Prigozhin speaks out

Commentary from John Authers at Bloomberg:

"The way that Yevgeny Prigozhin declared a mutiny, advanced a long way toward Moscow, and then agreed to stop and go home makes no sense. Neither does the way Putin accused him of treason, and then appeared to agree to forget about all of it. We still have a lot to learn about what just happened, as well as what will happen next. It’s just faintly possible that the whole thing was staged, for some reason nobody can yet grasp. But I don’t think this can possibly be the end of the story. Even if it was all some weird charade, what Prigozhin did took Russia into new territory.

These words came from Prigozhin on Telegram. They’ve been widely disseminated. They cannot be unsaid. And at present, he isn’t going to be punished for saying them. It’s hard to see how this doesn’t profoundly change the balance of forces in Russia, and indeed Putin’s grip on power. The translation was provided by Marko Papic of Clocktower Group:

"As far as I know, Zelenskiy was open to anything when he became president. All we had to do was get down from our high horse and go make a deal. The entire western Ukraine is populated by genetically Russian people. What is happening now is that we are just killing Russians...

Why was the war needed? It was needed so that a bunch of _____ [bad word] at the top could show their might and get some good PR. Second, the war was needed for the oligarchs. It was needed for the clan that today pretty much rules Russia. This oligarch clan receives everything it possibly can."

These things have been unsayable until now. The possibility that the whole invasion was a bad idea from the get-go, motivated by internal machinations, is now in the Russian political bloodstream. Even if this was some brilliantly staged deception from a John le Carre novel to give Putin the excuse to clamp down, it makes no sense that Prigozhin was allowed to say this. However it ends, and whether or not Prigozhin is still alive in a few weeks, this episode must weaken Putin and the current regime. And it cannot be over."