The Times reported overnight, based on U.S. intelligence, that one of the senior Russian generals in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, at least had advanced knowledge of the Wagner Mutiny and may have had some role in planning it. Surovikin is a one-time commander of Russian forces in Ukraine and remains a senior commander in the theater. You can read the details in the piece but I want to focus your attention on something different. This is another example of the Biden administration using selective disclosure of U.S. intelligence as an offensive tool in its cold conflict with Russia.

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If you haven’t read it yet, I want to make sure you saw Josh Kovensky’s look at key questions surrounding the Wagner Mutiny. Josh is both a Russian speaker and worked for about three years as a reporter in Ukraine. So, as usual, he brings a wealth of contextual knowledge and insight to making sense of these developments. I wanted to add a few observations to my Sunday afternoon piece on the emerging after-action reports about the Mutiny.

First, in that post I highlighted accounts from two expert observers — Michael Kofman and Tatiana Stanovaya. Both accounts have generally been confirmed, at least in their outlines. But one point that seemed a bit off in Stanovaya’s analysis was the certainty that Prigozhin and his mercenaries would be annihilated when they arrived in Moscow. That didn’t seem quite right, or even entirely consistent with the rest of her analysis. It certainly seems like one likely outcome. But it didn’t seem to comport with the uncertainty of the situation.

We are almost three weeks into this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’ve done well so far: We’re at $363,347. But we are at the point in the drive when we need to convert “doing well so far” into actually hitting our goal. And we only have a bit more than a week left to do it. Our goal of $500,000 this year isn’t aspirational or a number pulled out of the air. It’s really necessary to keep us on track this year and into next year. Also, let me remind you that for every contribution, we create community subscriptions for readers who lack financial means or who are registered students. If you’ve been considering it, please take a moment to make a contribution today. I’m ready to get back to just posting about the news and I’m sure you are ready for me to do that too. But first we need to get to our goal to get back to doing what we do and want to do more of. Thank you. Here’s the link.

CNN got a copy of the audio recording noted in the Mar-a-Lago indictment in which Trump shows off highly classified military plans for an attack on Iran to some randoms who were putting together a biography of Mark Meadows. I’m not sure which is more shocking: that he was doing this or that someone was writing a Mark Meadows bio. But however that may be, CNN has the recording. It was from 2021 and the recording was made at Trump’s Bedminster golf club.

Like, I suppose, most people in the world, I’m still trying to make sense of what happened in Russia over the weekend. But what information I’ve been able to gather this morning tells me that this ended very much as a draw. Prigozhin doesn’t seem to be slinking off into obscurity or through a helpfully open window, though the latter could certainly happen at any moment. In fact, he released a message today in which he continued to make the case for his one-day mutiny and actually in a way upped the ante.

With the news that Kevin McCarthy has now switched his focus to impeaching Merrick Garland, I’d draw your attention to last week’s piece on learning to love impeachment.

Plenty of Russia Mutiny content below. But don’t forget to contribute to our TPM Journalism Fund fundraiser.

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.