Russia Ukraine War

Where is the Wagner Force?

The puzzle persists…

Today, 10 July, Putin’s pet mouthpiece, Dmitry Peskov, said that Putin had met with Prigozhin and 34 commanders at the Kremlin on 29 June 2023. This comes straight from the horse’s #### at Tass, not via Twitter or Telegram.

MOSCOW, July 10. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin had a nearly three-hour-long meeting with Yevgeny Prigozhin and PMC Wagner commanding officers in the Kremlin on June 29, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

Commenting on a piece by the Liberation newspaper about Putin’s meeting with Prigozhin after what happened on June 24, the Kremlin spokesman said, “The president did hold such a meeting.”

“He invited 35 people — all the squad commanders and the leadership of the [private military] company, including Prigozhin,” he said. “The meeting took place in the Kremlin on June 29 and lasted for nearly three hours.”

“We are unaware of the details (of the meeting — TASS), but the one thing we can say is that the president gave his assessment of the [private military] company’s actions on the frontline during the special military operation and the June 24 events,” Peskov noted.

“Putin listened to explanations from [Wagner] commanders and offered them further options for employment and further use in combat,” the presidential spokesman said. “The commanders themselves shared their version of what happened [on June 24], they emphasized that they are staunch supporters and soldiers of the head of state and the supreme commander-in-chief, and also said that they are ready to continue fighting for the Fatherland.”

“This is all we can say about this meeting,” he added.

And, as a matter of record, these are the tags that Tass put on the story:

Vladimir PutinDmitry PeskovPMC Wagner attempted armed mutiny

Make no mistake, this was not an ‘attempted mutiny’. It was a mutiny plain and simple. Russian helicopters were shot down, a valuable Ilyushin 22-M C3 plane was shot down, thirteen Russian airmen were killed and Russian forces bombed the Wagner column on the M4 motorway between Rostov and Voronezh.

Attempted? No way. It might be considered an attempted coup by some, but a mutiny it certainly was.

This latest Peskov statement is a breathtaking admission of Putin’s impotence.

Putin met with the leaders of the mutiny and let them go — the press release doesn’t say that exactly — but if he’d had them sent to the basement of the Lubyanka and bullets in their brains then surely he would have said so?

This was days after Putin had branded Prigozhin as an outlaw, a criminal.

Russia has a well-known tendency to re-write history so I checked the Russian State Organ (Tass) for 24 June 2023 on the internet waybackmachine:

MOSCOW, June 24. /TASS/. A criminal case over charges of organization of armed mutiny was initiated against Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin after his Telegram channel published his claims that the Russian Defense Ministry hit PMC units with airstrikes and his calls for supporters to rise against the national government.

The Defense Ministry debunked claims of airstrikes at Wagner PMC units. Kremlin Spokesman stated that President Vladimir Putin was informed about the situation regarding Prigozhin, adding that all necessary measures are being taken.

Amazing.

The chutzpah of it.

Prigozhin’s achievement

The longer this farce continues then the stronger my belief becomes that Prigozhin — and his co-conspirator Dmitry Utkin — are holding something really big over Putin’s head.

They stopped the Justice March at Voronezh.

The following day the FSB raided Priogizhin’s St. Petersburg mansion and confiscated US dollars and gold bars, a haul said to have been worth $111 million or thereabouts. We saw the pictures. And then it was all returned to Prigozhin.

It has been said that Wagner handed back all the armour, artillery and AA defence systems to the Russian armed forces after the mutiny. Why would they do that?

Do they have something more powerful?

In my mind there’s no question that Putin achieved his initial objectives, although they may not be entirely clear to us.

Changes afoot?

The Moscow Times reports [10 July] that:

We have at last seen a video of Valery Gerasimov, the first since the mutiny. Earlier, The Moscow Times had reported that Gerasimov had been relieved of his responsibility:

The video comes just days after Russian military bloggers claimed Gerasimov had been dismissed amid the fallout of Wagner’s June 24 mutiny.

Both his appearance and that of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu after the armed revolt suggest that President Vladimir Putin ignored Prigozhin’s demand for their dismissal.

There’s a high stakes game on, for sure.

Where are the 25,000 Wagnerites?

Last week the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, told us that the Wagner chief and his mercenaries weren’t there.

To summarise his point: they might end up in Belarus — but they might not.

Plane trackers know that Priogzhin’s plane seems to have wide freedom to travel in Russia and Belarus.

It’s not easy to hide or move 25,000 troops. I acknowledge reports that some of them have gone home and some have signed the Russian government contracts. But nowhere near all.

It’s certain that Putin knows where they are, but there’s nothing currently surfacing on the internet that I can find. However, we do know that Wagner has an operations base in Molokino, near Krasnodar, about 300 km from Rostov-on-Don.

They were certainly not in the prepared camp in Belarus on 8 July, according to the BBC’s reporter Steve Rosenberg:

Conclusion

None of the serious political commentators I read can explain the extremely odd political stand-off between Putin and Prigozhin.

Nobody admits to knowing where the Wager force is. No analysts or vloggers claim to know.

At this moment they are probably the most seasoned and capable force in Russia. Yes, let’s not forget the Akhmat battalion of Chechens who were sent to capture the Wagnerites on the M4 motorway but failed to get through a traffic jam. But we’ll ignore them for now.

So, where are the Wagnerites, where is Prigozhin and where is Dmitry Utkin? In another story I likened Prigozhin to the Scarlet Pimpernel. Utkin is more of a Will ‘O the Wisp.

Is another mutiny in the making?

What are they holding over Putin’s head?

There has to be something.

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