Who Knows?

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.