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.