I'm not sure why he was flying around in Russia though.
The article has a point though: the next Prigozhin might have just learned not to stop a coup as much as not to start to one.
this is why it doesn’t make sense to assume this was a net negative for putin. the math is wrong. the details don’t add cleanly.
had he been flying in africa only to have a wing fall off, the situation and the impact would be quite different.
Maybe the replacement just wants to end the war? How do they do that exactly? I know at least one way with a high probability of success.
A successor who is more brutal but more "rational" can be reckoned with. Sometimes you really can just pay a bully to knock it off. Everybody hates it, and it would leave Ukraine paying most of the price, but they can be told that they won't get any more military aid. And then everybody goes back to undercutting each other diplomatically and economically instead of conquest (until the next time).
Right now all anybody knows is that a successor will be different. And since Putin appears to be capable of preserving an unacceptable status quo indefinitely, a lot of people would rather guess that the situation will improve without him.
Which sucks. That's Putin's goal: to make it suck. He'll play what happens from there by ear, which sounds stupid but it "works" from his own point of view.
Well I'd suggest in the continuum of latter-day Andropov to Putin he's the most authoritarian, so we have a couple of decades of less oppressive examples.
kimmie is still eating good.
A lot of Wagner people were willing to follow Prigozhin to Moscow. Many of them are serious people who know how to use extreme violence. It only needs a few of them to decide to take revenge for Putin to be in real peril.
If they succeed in offing Putin then the world is in for a period of frightening instability.
I don't know if I agree the world would be in for a period instability. I suppose it depends on how aligned this Wagner group is with Russia as a whole? Or is Russia similar to the U.S. - highly polarized such that any violence at this level will only beget more violence?
> At some point, the impulse to develop an insurance policy for self-preservation is going to grow stronger. And in dictatorships, that impulse — when shared and coordinated between elites — leads to the downfall of dictatorships.
In Putin's case, he is stronger, only because he has been severely weakened by this war. The bulk of the article is regarding the disagreeing or arguing with with a dictator, but Prigozhin didn't just disagree with him, he tried to lead the army against him. He cannot be allowed to live after that for Putin to remain in power. And the only way Putin leaves office is in a box.
pierogi did far more than just disagree. he went against pupu, with weapons. he failed. then he waited. and waited. dead man walking. then falling from the sky.
pupu could, in just the right light (takes a tremendous amount of work) be described as patient, calculating, and strong, from these actions. he didn’t tolerate this upstart, but he didn’t lose his temper. he cleaned up a mess.
that’s far easier to sell than cloak-and-dagger poisonings and balcony falls for otherwise unknown “threats.” pierogi loved to mouth off on camera, and it’s not like it was the pope on the plane.
the linked opinion piece, on the other hand, goes on and on about how pupu is zugzwang - it smells like the sweaty, crinkled term paper for a political think tank homework assignment on attempts at influencing geopolitics via shitty social media pieces.
Killing Prigozhin I don't think it goes one way or the other.
