Putin’s Enemies Toss A Surprise On Him, The Rebel March On Moscow.

Complex !! Dramatic !! Baffling !! Puzzling !!

Putin’s distraction a certain Yevgeny Prigozhin has fixed the global gaze on the Russian Federation. It will be considered an absurdity by Moscow but it has antecedents that issue a warning for actors the world over drawn into military tactics. It is however unprecedented to see anything like a rebel group marching on the government of a superpower.

The attempt to manifest itself on Chinese soil backfired. Beijing contained something in the semblance of the mayhem that characterized the Arab Spring in 2011. Now, a rebel movement in one of its most organized forms turns on Russia, how will the savvy former KGB spy, transformed into a President handle

Reports say, the Wagner group is the creation of the regime in Russia, only to do the unthinkable with this u-turn. So the new military brand of Russia around the world, now has the effect of a boomerang, servant becoming the albatross on master. Whether other circumstances modify situation on the ground, and the optics presented to the world, the matters arising have these questions for all to ponder on.

1. How will future relations between the Wagner Group and Putin be like, especially as the latter virtually funded and equipped the group?

2. What is the implication for the war in Ukraine seeing that Moscow relies heavily on Wagner for its war in Ukraine?

3. How will this development be an assessment of Russia’s military “ foot on the ground “ strength?

4. Who wins a face-off?

At the very least, Russia has been a theatre for a clandestine proxy scheming toward war on hardline communists. This ratchets up further and is almost now at its peak between a savvy KGB apostle and the master tacticians of America symbolized in Obama and Biden whose party is also in charge of government, the former who is a past President, and the latter the current.

 

Unlike America which has to all intents and purposes made a clean break from anything that leans toward its 17th-century civil war in the time of President Abraham Lincoln, Russia has the most recent cases of internal instability. Talk of the 1991 coup against Mikkail Gorbachev, the last leader of the then Soviet Union by highly-placed cohorts in the attempt to prevent what was considered the ultimate sell out by the leader
to the west and restore the communist system.

The current doings of the Wagner Group in Russia would have been a non starter in western advanced democracies. Without making historical surveys beyond the period projected for a review, two things are clear. Russia is prone to the nuances of internal instability. It also has elements within who are opposed to tendencies at deceiving Russia out of its conventional sense to the dismantling of its single monolithic estate. In the 1991 chapter of coup, it had its remote cause. It had the systematic western influence on the then Soviet leader who was stampeded to tone down on doctrine in return for greater international acceptability and participation.

Laced with these were the eventual breakdown of communism, global clout and the crystalizing of the world into a unipolar from bipolar. The coup was crushed with the help of Boris Yeltsin who was the leader of Russia the largest state of the Soviet Union. The fall out was the disintegration of the union. The successor to that phase the Commonwealth of Independent States failed to hold or sustain itself till it petered away. Russia has stepped in those shoes.

It is also a subject of interest why Yeltsin settled on Putin to be his successor after musical chairs among all the possibles. The pro-Western Boris Yeltsin who quelled the coup against Gorbachev by communist forces, went in for a Spy Chief, Vladimir Putin, a hardcore apologist of the system under attack. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin are dead and gone. Welcome to the Putin generation.

From what has panned out so far, Putin is avowed to restore Russia to parity in the eyes of the world as a superpower, and not a weakling. With America lurking around, one is able to clench fists this way only when you know your own potential and substance are as worthy as your opponent in the ring. This then suggests the scaling down of the Soviet Union means nothing to Putin’s generation, and that it sits on something which is significant enough to jostle and wrest with America and her allies.

Rather than bog down readers with heavy statistics, it is better to race through the economic pillars of Russia. The country is a member of OPEC+ with enormous amounts of oil, gas and other treasured minerals to her name. Russia is a table topper when it comes to gold. Also, she is among countries with highest defence spending, being one of the greatest in the invention and production of military technology. All these and others unmentioned due to a need for brevity, are held together or underpinned by scientific advancements. In a nutshell, Russia cannot be wished away or dismissed easily. She is a supplier of military hardware to juggernauts as India, Pakistan, South Africa, and China. In gas, much of Europe has been heavily reliant on Russia.

Armed with these, Putin’s Russia has set itself up for a collision course with the United States, matching the latter boot for boot on all fronts. For instance, lately, when the US pulled out of the late 1980s nuclear treaty which was meant to contain the two in that sphere, Russia responded by also quitting. The ever improving Sino-Russia relations, and the determination of the BRICS, Russia and China inclusive, as an alternative economic bloc to obviate and challenge western structures and influence in the world, takes the simmering volcano notches higher into the conflagration we see today. Topping the agenda on the BRICS’ 2023 meeting in South Africa is the proposal for the creation of a new currency to be used as benchmark for global financial systems. A currency war.

The US had snowballed to a freeze at all places where she supported change agents in the Arab Spring countries. Russia entered Syria in support of the Assad regime and did same for Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. Eventually, America exited these war theatres in avoidance of direct confrontation. Clearly, these two mighty nations have respect for each other, and nudge themselves into a restraint over the conséquences of unbridled actions.

As part of Russia’s offensive, it provided sanctuary for the high-profiled American dissident, Edward Snowden who flagrantly poked at time-honored rules and spilled classified information. Putin is also accused of meddling in the 2016 American elections by hacking the system. The victors the Republicans. The unenviable emblem of the vanquished going to the democrats. Analysts in assessment of possibilities, have pinned any reason for doing that on Putin’s quest to deny the democrats the chance of coming to power.

If putin has any veiled fear of America at this time, it is indeed the batch of Obama, Biden, and Hilary which took the world by storm, by scoring some firsts, a sort of doing what Napoleon couldn’t do. The trio represented the midas touch, allegedly for inspiring the ouster of Libya’s Colonel Mouammar Kadhafi and masterminding the arrest and killing of Osama Bin Laden. America harbored a great deal of contempt for the two over crimes against humanity, especially western nationals. In trends that are not explicit, but only implied due to the coincidence of interfacing the tenure of Obama, the Arab Spring bore features that looked carefully planned and well executed. Areas visited by this mayhem had sparked revolutions and caused regime changes.

If the United States are not behind these, and the facts do not suggest to the contrary, Russia has had the occasion to also rebut insinuations she was involved in the lethal attacks on one or two of its dissident citizens in territories other than Russia. These also bore the hallmarks of discreet undercover agents. A diplomatic furore that ensued saw the retaliatory dismissal of diplomats. Russia was also dismissed from the G8, the prestigious group of the world’s economic powers. It is work in progress regarding the raft of sanctions to be undertaken on Russia.

One of the strongest measures against Putin is his tagging as a war criminal and the demand for his arrest by the international Criminal Court. There appears to be no cap on the saga of “do me i do you” as Russia has issued its own version of charges on Americans.

And why would war charges be brought against Putin? It is about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin went to war with this neighbor, also a former constituent of the defunct Soviet Union over what he as the commander in chief of the armed forces, termed as extreme provocation when Ukraine allowed the Northern Atlantic Treaty organization, NATO, the military pact of western forces, to station a nuclear warhead in the country. Russia had argued that the act reneged on earlier agreements forbidding such a move. A national security threat, it called it. Ukraine itself had a bone to pick with Russia in the form of the latter’s annexation of Crimea. Russia too had an axe to grind in the wake of the Orange revolution that forced out the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich. These contentions go down to the dynamics of culture and history.

As Russia prosecutes this war, intent on repelling what it considers to be western adversity positioned close on its borders by virtue of being in the Ukraine, suddenly Wagner pops up as the other fighters pointing arrows on the regime in Moscow. What a wow!!! The latest permutation of Wagner is that it is now a rebellion against Putin who had created the group himself. This margins into précédents in which the United States had been able to permeate and used internal groups against their own governments, allegedly.

At this point, the new twist is subject to various interpretation yet only by careful intelligence one might configure the blurry lines. Was Russia provoked to go to war with Ukraine, so it dissipates time and resources before the snake that lay under the grass called Wagner reared its head? This phase of the unfolding scenario catches Putin and his allies unawares, and sends a loud and clear message on the depths to which opponents of his regime are prepared to go to unravel him. The turn of events highlights the limitations on all security systems. 9/11 is the physical blot America took in this respect. Even its advanced technological systems was also susceptible to manipulation from outside, granted the hacking of its 2016 polls was true. Now, Russia’s own collaborate the Wagner Group has turned the heat on Putin. This is more than meet the eye.

At the last count, It was reported that the rebels were withdrawing to base after coming within 200 miles of Moscow. Among the possible reasons for the unpredicted action, was perhaps Intelligence tip-off that the fight ahead could exhaust their arsenal midstream. It makes sense to assume Ukraine was the diversionary war tactic played on Russia.

Hiding and diversion games on Russia by the US scored respectable success in the past. In the US, MX missile land-based ICBM program, treatise with the Soviet Union limited the number of nuclear missiles each side could have. The US wanted to make it harder for the soviets to destroy them all. The missiles were kept on special underground trains that traveled back and forth between different launch silos. There were many more silos than missiles. Since the soviets will never know which silos held missiles at any time, they would have to target each silo independently and therefore waste many of their own warheads. This is the sort of thinking behind decoys.

No one should ever joke with sworn enemies that are committed to lifetime objectives on that score. It is one of the reasons the subject literature is ever relevant, with Shakespeare having to bring to the fore such life’s realities in fictional dramas. Jesus Christ faced similar battle, in the end He was crucified with no mercy. In the post crucifixion era, the Heavens and hell are still thought to be in a tango in many religious circles. Same between earthly superpowers.

All contending forces must not underrate each other when they present themselves to be weaklings or disappear from sight. Taking a leaf from Prof. Ninson a political scientist, he said when opponents interact towards a retreat, they will return even more fiercely, harshly or wildly. Was Ukraine not looking like a weakling that put Russia in some form of complacency? Not knowing its most discreet enemy was in the bedroom, waiting to strike at the most appropriate time. Russia is now caught between and betwixt Ukraine and Wagner. How will Putin and his regime respond to this alert? In times like these, friends count. Belarus, the loyal former Soviet Republic has risen to become Russia’s first line of defense.

A comprehensive war of alliances could draw Iran and China. The United States have been acting in concert with NATO, its alliance bloc. Is the United Nations going to weigh into these matters, even more rigorously than before, now that the embers are changing from the amber Into red alert. Only a thin line separates peace from war.