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We’re starting to get some first after-action reports from highly knowledgable observers of just what that wild 24 hours of the Wagner Mutiny in Russia was about. Here are two threads I recommend. I can’t know whether they’re right. But they’re both from highly knowledgable people. It’s worth hearing their take. First is this thread from Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analysis. The second is from Tatiana Stanovaya, another widely respected Russia analyst who I believe is currently based in France. I recommend both. But here are my overarching takeaways — again, none of this my analysis, just summarizing and trying to capture the gist of theirs and others.

If you have a chance, read this piece by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As always with David, it’s very good. He interviews an independent Russian journalist who left the country after Russia invaded Ukraine. As both make clear, it’s very hard to know what’s really happening in Russia, even for Russians and even for Russians who have a strong understanding of the internal mechanisms of power. Opacity is an intrinsic feature of Russian political culture. The gist is that that this makes a major dent in Putin’s power and likely hastens his exit from the scene. But there’s no guarantee that departure is any time soon. It’s probably a good thing for Ukraine, unless it isn’t. We also can’t rule out some dramatic worsening of the situation if Putin’s escalates in an effort to reassert power and dominance or if he is succeeded by a more violent and fanatic figure.

So yeah, in addition to Russian state collapse below we also have this fundraiser.

From all the reliable accounts we have access to the Wagner column is driving toward Moscow, a journey of roughly 700 miles from the border with Ukraine which the column crossed some time yesterday. Moscow appears to be digging in and preparing for an attack. The mayor has canceled all work in the city tomorrow. There are rumors of lots of other things. But these facts seem clear, or as clear as anything can be at such a moment. The key fact I can see is that this relatively small armed group seems to be traversing the country more or less unopposed after taking the major regional center of Rostov essentially without a fight.

From TPM Reader AS …

In 2017 Michael Kofman appeared on the Loopcast, discussing Russia’s approach to national security strategy.  I think that a lot of what he says helps to explain how we got here, even if it’s not very helpful in helping us to figure out what’s going on in the moment:

https://www.theloopcast.com/e/overview-of-russian-national-security-strategy/

Russia is much smaller and weaker than the US, but they’ve been able to give us quite a bit of trouble over the past few years.  In the podcast episode, the term “near-peer” is used to describe Russia.  How has Russia been able to punch above their weight?

As you can see, things have progressed pretty dramatically since I wrote the post immediately below this one yesterday afternoon. It remains very hard to know precisely what is happening in Russia — both in terms of troop movements on the ground and who is in charge of what right now in the Russian state. It seems fair to say that Prigozhin and Wagner would not be able to accomplish even the limited gains they’ve made so far without either some level of at least passive support from elements of the Russian military and security services or an extreme degree of demoralization/disaffection that is keeping those groups on the sidelines. In addition, it’s hard to see how this crisis doesn’t lead to some serious unit cohesion and even command and control problems for the Russian Army in Ukraine, though there’s been little clear sign of that so far. Beyond that I’m really out of my element to say more. You can of course read write-ups in the standard publications. But what I’m doing is watching these two curated lists I created more than a year ago to follow the Russo-Ukraine War. Here’s one on the conflict generally and here’s another focused specifically on military analysts. While this current situation is not the Ukraine War proper, you want to hear from the same people generally. And of course it is deeply related to it.

I’m totally out of my depth when it comes to internal Russian politics. But I know enough about which people are in their depth to know that something pretty serious is up. Yevgeny Prigozhin runs the Wagner group, something between a big Russian military contractor and a state-adjacent paramilitary. They played a big and fairly gruesome role in Syria and various other global hotspots where Russia is involved. Prigozhin, sometimes known as “Putin’s chef,” also happens to be the guy who ran a lot of the troll farms that sowed havoc in the 2016 election. Wagner has played a significant role in Ukraine and there’s been a feud of some sort between Prigozhin/Wagner and the Russian Ministry of Defense for months. But just today things appear to have taken a dramatic new turn with Prigozhin releasing videos saying he’s “declaring war” on the Ministry of Defense and making a number of public claims that throw the entire rationale for the invasion of Ukraine itself into doubt. In other words, they are the kind of moves you don’t come back from.

When we kicked off this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive we were sobered by the sheer scale of the hill we had to climb. But just over two weeks in we’re now just over 70% of the way to our goal. It seems increasingly possible, though we still have a ton of the way to go. If you’ve been considering contributing, you can do that by clicking right here.

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I saw someone last night making the fairly ludicrous claim that ProPublica’s muckraking exposés on Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito and the groundswell of revulsion they’ve touched off are no different from Donald Trump’s efforts to impugn the U.S. electoral system for his own political benefit. This is of course a risible and dishonest point for all the obvious reasons. It seems that for years or decades into the future we’ll be living with conservatives trying to get out from under the shame of Trumpism by saying this ordinary argument or that investigative journalism is comparable or no better than Donald Trump’s wars by conspiracy theory.

But the comment did get me thinking about the context of these exposés. It’s at least true that they do not arrive in a vacuum.