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.

[We’re entering the final stretch in this month’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. Click here to contribute.]

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.

We might actually get to $350,000 in the TPM Journalism Fund drive tonight. We’re currently at $341,893. Wanna help us hit this key milestone? Just click right here.

Some of you are probably asking, does Josh really like doing all of these posts about the TPM Journalism Fund? Well, not particularly. But I’m happy to do it because these contributions directly impact the quality and depth of the journalism we will be able to bring you for the rest of this year and into the next. And that’s important enough to me that I’m happy to harp on this maybe more than I otherwise would.

One recurring feature of our organization and readers’ perception of it is that people think we are a much larger organization than we are. So a single additional hire or a relatively small amount of additional budget can have a big impact. It can also allow us to make investments that won’t show fruit until many months later. Remember, we’re not a subsidiary of some bigger company let alone a mega-corporation. So our business practices have to be very small-c conservative. There’s no net or larger entity in the background bankrolling us or injecting additional money if things don’t go according to plan.

That can make running this operation a bit anxiety provoking. But the plus side of that is that there’s no big diversified corporation making the big decisions for reasons unconnected with journalism. There’s no boss uninvolved in our daily work telling us what to do. Every decision that affects TPM gets made by someone whose byline you see every day or someone on the publishing team you can see right down there on the masthead.

Here’s the link.

From TPM Reader SH …

Those who can’t seem to get around to contributing should know that once they finally do, the next time it will take longer to sneeze than to donate. You guys have a very efficient system.

Keep up the great work! You guys have been keeping me sane for 15+ years.

It’s really that easy. Just click right here.

Late Update: I just checked the numbers. We might actually get to $350,000 today. We’re currently at $334,196.