https://twitter.com/RepSlotkin/status/1672578605958811648
I will lay off my predictions since I've been wrong consistently so far, but in my defense, predicting what actually happened (after, say, the first overtly mutinous videos came out) would have constituted wild ravings at the time.
I'll stick my neck out and predict Prigozhin's merry men seek other employment after the first airstrike hits them.
3 already has. A column seems to be in Yelets now. That's halfway to Moscow.
https://www.ft.com/content/6f520bca-ad52-479b-9fd5-c1e36e69e88e
https://www.ft.com/content/a7440939-eedf-41b4-933b-54145b5bc609
Kadyrovites just a few km from Rostov, reportedly.
I think this guy is making the best prediction.
Brad DeLong links to this thread which is helpful: https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1672573242014588929
Civil Special Operation, please and спасибо.
Meduza reports that Putin's plane flew to St. Petersburg.
I guess now we know why the two generals' video messages yesterday (late Friday night in Russia, when it kicked off*) sounded so plaintive ("The columns must stop"). At least at that moment, there wasn't much standing in the way of the "columns".
*Amusingly, one unconfirmed report that most of the main security people in Rostov were drunk when the threat was known.
Dmitri@wartranslated·14m
Wagner supporters are seriously agitated against Kadyrovites. I do not know if it's a good idea for the latter to show up anywhere. But the fact that they're last to be defending Putin's regime is quite striking.
The Wagnerites cruised past a bunch of Rosgvardia without the latter firing a shot. Those are supposed to be the guys who would stop this sort of thing.
Kevin Rothrock@KevinRothrock
Prigozhin has apparently activated his troll farm to spam Muscovites with robocalls promoting the march on Moscow.
He should try seeing if they want to choose a Medicare plan too.
9: that thread makes the comparison to 1917. Putin also made that comparison in his speech. I'm not sure that was the best idea for inspiring confidence in his ability to control the situation.
Felt like posting a few of my own
https://twitter.com/barryfreednyc/status/1672628020203462659?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
https://twitter.com/barryfreednyc/status/1672638414343004161?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
In this context, is "Wagner" pronounced like the composer or the power painter?
I've heard Russia experts pronounce it with a regular' 'w' so I suppose not.
The Russian spelling is "Группа Вагнера", which Wikipedia Romanizes to "Gruppa Vagnera." Cyrillic "В" corresponds to /v/, which is the regular English v sound. Supposedly the name is from the composer because neo-Nazis, but it's not entirely clear.
Showdown expected on the Oka bridges, apparently.
But! Lukashenka, of all people, is saying he's talked Prigozhin down! Stranger things have happened!
I like that Google maps still gives me restaurant reviews.
23 Google is showing major traffic jams on both sides of the bridge
1,5 звезды. Пахнет напалмом.
28 this makes no sense. He's a marked man, he's got to know that, no choice but to go for broke
Sure. But I'm thinking all the guys with guns sitting around him aren't liking the look of that highway of death up in 23.
https://www.ft.com/content/9cd09366-25db-4057-a41d-0ea04b659d97#post-e5d60873-da90-4116-a3f7-fe859734f2ca
In a voice memo posted to social media on Saturday evening, Prigozhin said:
We set off on June 23 on our march for justice. In 24 hours we moved 200km to Moscow. During that time we didn't spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Right now the moment has come when blood could be spilled. Therefore, understanding all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our convoy around and going back to our basecamps, according to the plan.The Kremlin did not immediately confirm it had agreed to let Prigozhin's forces retreat.
I mean, Lukashenko is one of very few potentially useful allies to either party, right? It makes sense that Putin (I imagine) would call in his leverage. Who else is there?
Moreover Lukashenko is at least moderately vulnerable to parallel insurrection... I already can't find whatever source on this I saw, but seems logical that he'd be motivated.
32: Sure! Just highlighting the absurdity of it all. Minsk Process 2.0, etc.
The guy went from prison to selling hot dogs to catering state dinners to leading a mercenary group. Nothing about him makes any sense.
I am Eugene's unconventional life trajectory.
Remind me to avoid Russian state dinners.
Seems like there still ought to be some massed Russian troops around for Ukraine to send a missile at.
Strangest 24 hours I've ever seen
The outstanding question for me now is which of these players was specifically invested in wrecking my productivity goals for the weekend. It was going so well! Now I'm just hitting "refresh" waiting on a Kremlin statement? Terrorism.
Er, so Putin caved to a putschist with an army and agreed to make the MoD more amenable to him, after the putschist showed how well he can challenge the regime. And the guy gets to live? Things are wild, weird and unpredictable in Russia but this doesn't quite convince.
On the contrary: offering him the poison pill of state sanction, keeping an enemy close while getting rid of useless and disliked figures, doesn't seem totally irrational to me, although there's no reason to believe it yet. I could actually see this as a moment of genuine indecision for Putin (if not for very long).
https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1672472494207381504?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
38: As I noted on Twitter the most likely explanation is that it didn't happen, and we were just caught in a Pamela Ewing dream again.
Glad to see so many people responding with the obvious answer, that this is exactly how Trump would play it:
Imagine if the CEO of Blackwater publicly declared his intention to march on Washington D.C., shot down multiple USAF aircraft and killed an unknown number of American soldiers, and then was given legal immunity and allowed to maintain his huge private army by the President.
It's almost banal at this point. The thought experiment gets interesting once you stipulate a major live war in which troop morale matters, though, never a scenario that interested Trump much. I'm not sure Putin has any options coming out of the coup attempt for improving morale and military performance, but placating Prigozhin is surely not the winning move there. The temptation to take it all out on innocent people in Ukraine must be overwhelming for all of these shitheads, so that doesn't bode well. I literally have not opened the bag of popcorn in the cabinet yet.
41: Anyway, I'm officially 60 now, so you all can look forward to even stupider takes with even more absurdly out-of-date pop culture references.
The Kremlin has spoken and I must go back into hiding in Belarus my offline productivity cage. Happy beepday, Perth!
Happy birthday peep!
Tangibly, I don't see it's that bad for Vlad. He ends the shitputsch without massacring too many Russians on TV, gets to keep the Wagner personnel (presumably to be divided up and sent to quick deaths on the front), and presumably also gets to divvy up Prigozhin's assets amony his retainers.
Intangibly, obviously it's still bad in showing how much he's lost his touch, and maybe giving disgruntled grunts some ideas. But, intangible.
Also, the exile-in-Belarus option is obviously a very useful precedent to have (though I doubt VV was thinking that)(And of course Prigozhin might be having a radiological accident. Which wouldn't be smart of Putin, but he isn't very smart.) .
What does all this mean for Wagner's operations in Africa?
Probably hard to get more work after such a half-assed coup.
47 me.
48: Interesting. Maybe recalled as unreliable; maybe nothing, they continue as before, with a different crony in overall charge; most interesting, maybe they sell/are sold out. Emiratis might be buying.
Or, you lot could declare them international terrorists and kill them all, like I've been telling you to for years.
Intangibly, obviously it's still bad in showing how much he's lost his touch, and maybe giving disgruntled grunts some ideas. But, intangible.
Technically intangible, but as I think I said yesterday, a big part of Putin's whole shtick is "at least he keeps order." With that gone, what does he have left recommending him?
54: Well, there was also the thing that if you tried to oppose him, he would kill you. As of now, this is in question too
"Be Disappointed by Someone New" goes much harder in Russia.
Supposedly the name is from the composer because neo-Nazis, but it's not entirely clear.
Yes, basically - Russians (and Ukrainians) like their noms de guerre, and Wagner was founded by a GRU Spetsnaz officer, Dmitri Utkin, whose callsign was "Wagner". He was also a neo Nazi.
Until lately I associated the name Prigogine with chaos theory. It becomes clear that an interest in chaos runs in the family.
https://inmoscowsshadows.buzzsprout.com/1026985/13103062-in-moscow-s-shadows-105-prigozhin-s-mutiny
Especially the second half, on the intangibles.
Curiouser and curiouser:
https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1673427285934850051
Attn mc https://twitter.com/hn_schlottman/status/1673496392256434179?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
An old fry cook named Zhenya 'Go' grew restless at the grill
A man filled with wanderlust who really meant no ill
He changed his clothes and shined his boots
And shaved his pale hair down
And his mother cried as he walked out
Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Zhen'
Don't take your guns to town
He laughed and kissed his mom
And said your Zhenya 'Go's a vozhd
I can march as quick and straight as anybody's putsch
But I wouldn't march without a cause
I'd gun nobody down
But she cried again as he rode away
Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Zhen'
Don't take your guns to town
He sang a song as on he rode
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into an army town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and stood beside the Don
And laid his pamphlet down
But his mother's words echoed again
Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Zhen'
Don't take your guns to town
He Telegramed his followers his narrative to push
And tried to tell himself at last, he had become a vozhd
A grizzled Tuvan at his side began to laugh him down
And he heard again his mothers words
Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Zhen'
Don't take your guns to town
Filled with rage then
Zhenya 'Go' reached for his gun to draw
But the Tuvan drew his gun and fired
Before he even saw
As Zhenya 'Go' fell to the floor
The crowd all gathered 'round
And wondered at his final words
Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Zhen'
Don't take your guns to town
62 thanks Barry. But he question was never "Will the mud dry?" but "How soon"?
I know that LLMs are the devil and all, but especially as age and insomnia destroy my brain, I value ChapGPT more and more. I had no idea what 63 was about, so I asked. https://chat.openai.com/share/fe6c4224-d9ab-4b72-9727-5c10015785a4
63 is great
64 not yet is an unacceptable answer? I imagine AFU meteorologists and soil scientists haven't been getting much sleep for the last few weeks.
It's a filk, isn't it? I'm not a LLM. Or maybe I am...
Thanks, chatbot! I had 63 in my head to the tune of Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town), probably because of the original's line about "the one who started that old crazy Asian war."
Good thread and linked RUSI report via our very own Alex https://twitter.com/yorksranter/status/1673685763022544901?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Here I was feeling so validated and then ogged gets his cooties all over me.
70.2: Well a date range would be nice to have, no? In terms of maneuvering tank armies and depots and such.
Moscow Times says Surovikin under arrest.
https://t.me/moscowtimes_ru/13970
Good for Ukraine if true!
Presumably there will have to be continued loyalty checks and a purge.
76 his deputy too, great news for Ukraine https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1674334125090648066?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Yes indeedy. Seems also increasingly clear the Ukrainians have, if not a bridgehead, some kind of screen that could develop into one on the left bank.
Institute for the Study of War:
A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner's rebellion has prompted "large-scale purges" among the command cadre of the Russian armed forces and that the Russian MoD is currently undergoing a "crash test" for loyalty. The milblogger claimed that the Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO) is conducting a review of the Russian military leadership as well as the individual unit commanders. The milblogger claimed that Russian officials are using the MoD's "indecisiveness" in suppressing the rebellion and "support for paramilitary companies (PMCs)" as pretexts to remove "objectionable" personnel from their positions.
79: They've been raiding across there for weeks but this seems to be a fixed foothold which the Russians have tried and failed repeatedly to dislodge. Interesting.
It is still hard fighting, though. Every battle big or small ends up being disarticulated into a lot of tiny semi-separate infantry fights, with a couple of dozen men on each side - and a successful attacker still taking 30% dead or wounded, unless they have a lot of support from tanks and fires. Same as it was in 1944. Those sorts of casualty rates, at scale, are not something that our troops have had to deal with, really, since the Falklands - and we are further in time from Goose Green than Goose Green was from D-Day.
Just received a first-hand account of exactly 81 from a Ukrainian officer who was over here for a bit.
The mine situation seems particularly bad
The instability of nuclear-armed Russia has also got me reflecting on the mine situation.
Maybe we can have a nuclear war exactly big enough for a nuclear winter that will offset global warming.
Let's not give the Republicans ideas.
I've told them that Bud Light is the only domestic lager known that can survive radioactive fallout.
The instability of nuclear-armed Russia has also got me reflecting on the mine situation.
This is the eighth coup or coup attempt that I know of in a nuclear-armed state, to put this in context.
In fact, thinking about it, the UK might be about the only case of a country that's never had an attempted coup or a lapse into dictatorship since becoming a nuclear power. (Might, because it's still far from clear what Jang Song-thaek was up to, and it depends if you count South Africa as a nuclear power.) USSR/Russia has had several, China had the Gang of Four, Pakistan's had a couple, India had the Emergency, France had the Algerian generals.
Israel (yet). IIRC Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan didn't have any coups in the relevant window. SA was a nuclear power, question is what you consider a coup or a dictatorship.
I'm still laughing about 63, which I can hear in Johnny Cash's voice.
France doesn't count, putsch was in 1958 and France didn't test a nuclear weapon until 1960.
Israel and South Africa and the other post-Soviets, yes. Good point
They're apparently making you sign in to view anything on twitter now. Some "public square"!
I'm not sure the last couple years in Israel don't qualify (thinking of eg court dissolution).
63 is of course glorious, but I also shared 72's problem, even though I'm familiar with the correct song.
98: It's the inexorable march of capitalism.
Related: Mastodon confused me and I can't figure out the different servers thing. What was the other one?
Bluesky, but that's still invite-or-waitlist. A chunk of people I follow got accounts recently but I'm still on the waitlist.
Thanks. I'll add my name to the list.
Someone was saying "And Bluesky is all a walled garden!" Well, Twitter is too now.
I wonder if embeds are still allowed even!
I never did get a twitter account, just checked in on a couple feeds, including one of you and LGM. I don't know how I'm going to keep up/waste an hour a day now.
I'm just sticking with mastodon until I see a reason to change, but I've had an account on a server there since 2017 and already settled into a lower-key usage pattern there than for twitter. I just look at twitter occasionally because of news.
I suspect walling off twitter might not be intentional or last too long. Even facebook has some public posts.
nitter.net still works except it doesn't show replies
I recently logged back into Mastodon and the first post I saw was yet another technical comment on social media architecture. Gets kind of tedious when that's so prominent.
106.2: Maybe that's slated to be a new perk for paying members.
What's prominent on a social media platform depends on who you follow. But recently Meta has been making moves towards setting up its own service and connecting to mastodon instances and that's generated another round of lower-case meta commentary.
I do think you see more of that kind of commentary on mastodon because people (generally, not everyone) tend to be somewhat closer to who runs the services and there's more concern about surviving, and more conscious trying to create an alternative approach to social media. There was also a huge wave of people who showed up, posted almost exclusively about social media itself, declared that was boring, and left. I was kind of hoping that the people I recognized from twitter would stay and be interesting. Some did.
Blue sky seems headed towards being twitter without Musk, but I've only read reports about it. I would be surprised if they go far into federation or community because I think that leads to a lot of what turns people off about mastodon in terms of it being confusing. Like when facebook turned off their already weak "site governance", Blue Sky probably will go full centralization or die.
tl;dr there's no escaping tedious architecture posts
tl;dr there's no escaping tedious architecture posts
I feel like this is my cue, but I don't know what to do with it.
In some ways, this situation reminds me of Le Corbusier's l'Unité d'Habitation--not so much the physical reality of the Unités, but rather their role in the larger cultural memory of postwar public housing...
Bluesky has been very good so far but I wish they would implement some more features like DMs for group chats.
I think an issue with Mastodon was the entry process selected for people who cared a lot more about architecture.
I just got on Bluesky and am liking it so far! Thanks for the invite, you know who you are.
I've been on their wait list for hours and hours.
Unfortunately they're stingy with giving invitations, I get one every two weeks.
I'm not even that sure I'd use it much. I just don't want to be left out.
I think an issue with Mastodon was the entry process selected for people who cared a lot more about architecture.
Yeah, a lot of these alternatives that already existed suffer from the problem that they were designed to be different from Twitter in some way, when what a lot of people just want is Twitter without Musk. Bluesky seems like the first one that offers that.
I think Post tried? But didn't perform as well, I forget why exactly.
I guess what I'd really like is for Reddit to not be enshittified.
A lot of them seem to be run by people who don't really know what they're doing. Bluesky seems maybe better on that but that's just secondhand since I'm not on there.
When Musk came I was almost at 1,000 Twitter followers, might have had that for like a day or so, but I lost a good chunk over the year. Amusingly, somehow now I've finally recovered and am at 1,009 and rising.
The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!
If this policy lasts more than a few days, Musk is literally destroying Twitter - they'd be nothing without addicted users, and he's making us go cold turkey.
123 so dumb. I think it must be related to this: https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-reportedly-refused-to-pay-its-google-cloud-contract-161936042.html
@123 hahaha what a moron [poo]
Speaking of morons, I think we can be sure Truth Social is going nowhere quickly.
There's no way to know why that's relevant.
123, if I'm reading it correctly the next story below that on says they resumed paying and re-established a working relationship with Google 10 days later (10 days ago).
I hope no one takes me for a socialist, but I'm starting to see a hidden downside in letting crucial piece of infrastructure be run by the whim of billionaires with the temperament of petulant children who just ate three services of cotton candy and then rode a ferris wheel.
Musk has raised all limits by 1/3. The scrappers have been defeated.
So, who had today in the pool on when Putin would get back at Prigozhin?
I was guessing it would be longer; that's not subtle.
Poor guy fell out of a window in the sky.
The grimmest and funniest explanation is that the PVO shot him down by mistake because they thought he was a Ukrainain drone.
https://x.com/bretdevereaux/status/1694413285955674319?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
135 That's what I was thinking. It's not like Belarus was a safe place, but going to Russia means that people close to him get killed too.
Maybe he saw the U.S. State Department notice about how Americans should leave Belarus and decided he should go too.
133: The Defenestration of Prig [stolen].