THE CRACKUP
June 24, 2023 -Durt Fibo
A regular 750ml bottle of vodka should contain 16 drinks, and a regular human body would process that at the rate of around one such drink per hour. However, anyone who’s seen them in action (like I have), knows that Russians usually drink alcohol out of water glasses. Wagner PMC proprietor Yevgeny Prigozhin today croaked that “In 24 hours we got to within 200 km of Moscow. In this time we did not spill a single drop of our fighters’ blood. Understanding … that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and going back to field camps as planned” [sic]. Hence we can formulate a means to estimate the number of bottles of vodka yesterday’s Russian coup trotters consumed.
Once the vodka ran out, Old Piroshky-head capitulated and swore to adhere to the terms of a deal ending the Wagnerite “march to Moscow”. Up until then, Moscow was on full, armed alert, with residents warned to not leave their homes. Huffing a halitosis of relief, Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov said today that Wagner fighters who had taken part in the “march for justice” would have all charges dropped, and that they will not face any action, in recognition of their “previous service to Russia.” The concord also stipulates that Prigozhin himself must live in Belarus. As the Russian media would have it, Belarus’ President Lukashenko had offered to mediate because he had known the mercenary leader personally for around 20 years, but it is more probable that he was forced to concoct the arrangement at Putin’s command; remember: the first round of peace talks in 2022 was initiated and arranged by Lukashenko precisely that way. Now both Piroshky and Luky are under 24-hour watch by their FSB babysitters.
Meanwhile, here is Lukashenko’s official website’s statement in full:
“June 24 [2023]
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This morning President of Russia Vladimir Putin informed his Belarusian counterpart about the situation in Russia’s south that had been caused by the private military company Wagner. The heads of state agreed on joint actions.
Acting upon the agreement, the Belarusian President additionally clarified the situation using his own channels and held negotiations with the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin with approval of the Russian President.
The negotiations lasted for the entire day. As a result, the sides agreed that it is unacceptable to start a bloodbath in Russia’s territory. Yevgeny Prigozhin accepted Aleksandr Lukashenko’s proposal on stopping the advance of Wagner’s armed units in Russia’s territory and on further steps meant to deescalate tensions.
At present an absolutely advantageous and acceptable variant to defuse the situation is available, including safety guarantees for fighters of the private military company Wagner.
It was reported earlier that earlier today the Belarusian President held two conferences with officers of defense, security, and law enforcement agencies in response to the situation in Russia.”
I had described Luky’s captive life last year thusly: “But Luky has as his reward had his country colonized by Russian armed forces and FSB goons to keep him from any further faux pas. They humor him as they trick him, knowing his weakness is playing the strong-man buffoon. On Tuesday, March 15, Lukashenko called a meeting of the Belarus special services, i.e., the GUBOPiK (Chief Directorate to Combat Organized Crime and Corruption), OMON (riot police) and SOBR (Special Rapid Reaction Department) -which only fight Belarusian citizens, not foreign armies- “For a serious man-to-man talk” (all per his own official governmental/presidential website). His “talk” consisted of expressing “a strong approval of the actions of the special services to respond to emerging challenges.” After that, ‘Europe’s longest sitting president’ returned with his security staff to his sofa, his resentments growing as he passes his days re-watching video tapes of midget wrestling and losing bets.” https://derkoolschrank.com/
President-for-Life Alexander “Idi Amin” Lukashenko has also called himself “the last dictator in Europe. He is also called that by the Belarus’ opposition -essentially a governnment-in-exile- headed by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who believes (like perhaps most Belarusians, the EU, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; OSCE) that she won the 2020 presidential election, and who immediately condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and later explained to interviewers: “We hear the same predictions. The Kremlin and Lukashenko are using each other, pursuing several goals: They want to hamper Ukraine and make Kyiv move its defenders from the east closer to Belarus, and they want to keep Belarusians themselves in a state of fear. It may be that though Putin is pushing Lukashenko, Lukashenko resists and does not want to send his own forces in. Putin and Lukashenko otherwise are in the same boat; they have the same goal of holding on to power. But we know the mood in Belarus: People will not participate in Putin’s war – more than 86 percent of Belarusians are against it. And nobody wants to become enemies with Ukraine.”
Private armies are illegal in Russia under Article 359 of the Russian Criminal Code. But, even as reported by TASS, Prigozhin was not charged with violating that law, he was merely charged for calling for an “armed mutiny.” The overarching rationale for this -or for overlooking the law- is that Russia is replete with such PMCs (Private Military Company), sometimes with pre-approval from Putin or other ministers. Of note are: Redoubt (Редут), Patriot (Патриот), Convoy, (Конвой), and Potok PMC (ЧВК Поток), which is owned by Gazprom, the Russian state gas company. Potok and another Gazprom PMC, Alexander Nevsky, have both been identified as combatants in Ukraine. And there are still many others, some rather small, like the Special Combat Army Reserve (Специальный боевой армейский резерв). Gazprom and Redoubt evidently formed at least two further PMCs – Fakel (факел) and Plamya (пламя), the latter under tight direction from the Ministry of Defense. Or, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi elucidated this (Saturday) evening: “Today the world can see that the masters of Russia control nothing. And that means nothing. Simply complete chaos. An absence of any predictability.”
Much of the planning and proselytizing of Ukraine’s supporters these days rests on the dogma that the Ukraine war is a showdown over the future of Europe (and the West), and both they and the Russians believe it is a struggle of geostrategic transformation and a new “security architecture.” This is actually wrong. It could’ve so been described by the middle of the war, but the things which could have then been cause for hope -for some fresh humanitarianism- are paralyzed for now, if not ossified. The other side of that magic coin is Europe and the West’s perception that a crackup of the Russian Federation might result from Ukrainian victory. Of this there is great fear.
It is vital to recall the sequence of what occurred since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR; capitalist consumerocracy hit the East like an asteroid. It displaced everything that existed before it and left a deluge of blood which took years to subside. Much of that impact came with unfamiliar elements that were inimical to the states and cultures it destroyed, and they spread toxins across that entire swathe of Earth. Without having lived direct capitalism, most of the people re-formed into what they sensed was the most fundamental organization of it: a Mob. A gang. A Mafia. And they had indeed grasped the very basis of the new socio-political methodology. An all-out mobster war was the ideal environment for the pre-made gangs’ -the KGB (later FSB)- mooks like Putin to bloom in. Cattle-prodded along to the abattoir by Western crackpot ideologues calling themselves economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, the Eastern nations escalated the stakes of asset grabbing and surviving by killing; it was called “disaster capitalism” and it was. But, having first grasped the very essence of free enterprise, the gangsters had no desire to evolve their Hollywood ganglands except in size, and their states became massive pyramids, wherein the surviving serfs passed their protection money up through the siloviki, who passed their tribute up to the Boss. From boyars to nomenklatura to siloviki, Russified tradition meant it always was paid up to the Tzar.
The Russian Federation is composed of 21 republics plus the Altai Territory. Altogether it encompasses roughly 200 different ethnic groups. Upon the forced dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was dizzyingly quickly reorganized as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The republics that joined were Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, rapidly followed by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The founding charter explicitly said that each member was a sovereign and independent nation. On March 27, 2022, I returned to the subject and wrote: As of today, there are only 9 full members of the CIS. Georgia and Turkmenistan departed for historical reasons. Of the remaining membership, Armenia and Azerbaijan have warred with and detest each other; Belarus is teetering; Kazakhstan tries to maintain relations with all 3 superpowers but had called for peace talks during Russia’s foolery in Crimea; Kyrgystan is about 50% pro-Russian in general but likes to war against Tajikistan; Moldova is partially Russian occupied and indignant about it; Russia is pro-Russia; Tajikistan is both pro-Russia and pro-China and also anti-Kyrgystan (see: war, above); and Uzbekistan withdrew from the CIS collective security arrangement in 1999, but is these days -or until this month- generally supportive of Russia. https://derkoolschrank.com/
One of the reasons I had “returned” to the subject of the CIS, is that I was at that time detailing how Russia alone managed to usurp the United Nations Security Council permanent member seat created for the USSR. That deep dive can also be found via the same link as in the above paragraph. But to sweep us back to the present, Putin’s historical course has stirred up a Ring of Fire around Moscow, building up to what might well become magmatic explosions of demands for independence. This is happening now in the Chechen Republic, Georgia, Tartarstan, Dagestan, Kalmykia, Mordovia, Buryatia, Komi, Sakha (Yakutia), Bashkortostan, and numerous ‘regions’ within the Federation, as well as a mounting number of nations surrounding but closely tied to it. As these places watch the achievements of Ukraine, movements begin taking direction in them. Further afield -but not far enough for Russia to ignore- are China’s 160-year-old irredentist aspirations for the Siberian and Amur regions -nearly a third of Russia’s landmass- including the crucial port city of Vladivostock (Port Arthur is already Lushun), and Japan’s reinvigorated demands for the return of the Kuril Islands.
So, no matter where fears and schemes lead, the only ideal end to the Russo-Ukraine war would see Ukraine reunited into a whole, Russia trimmed back like topiary to a manageable, moderately-sized and nonbellicose functioning democracy, and both countries -as well as those around them- sovereign, unbeholden to predatory socio-economic systems, and pleased to wave ‘good morning’ to their neighbors.