Ben Shapiro

No one knows what is going on in Russia.

A group called the Wagner Group is run by a former Putin ally named Yevgeny Prigozhin. It’s a group of mercenaries — 50,000 strong at a minimum — and these mercenaries have embedded themselves with the Russian military all over the place. It also has an independent-like mercenary body over the continent of Africa.

Prigozhin made a move over the weekend. He claimed originally that the Russian military had attacked the Wagner Group and then he said his group was going to march on Moscow.

This prompted everyone to freak out. For a brief moment, the entire media — which recognized that the Wagner Group is, indeed, a human-rights-violating, essentially terror group sponsored by Russia — flipped because Prigozhin was marching against Putin. Suddenly these became the good guys, which is really absurd on its face because Prigozhin is one of the worst people in the world.

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Vladimir Putin is also one of the worst people. None of these people are wonderful people. They’re all murderers. They’re all thugs. Prigozhin began his career being convicted of a wide variety of crimes up to and including the trafficking of women who were minors, and then he worked his way up from being a person who ran a hot dog stand to being the chief caterer to the Russian government, which was basically just a crony job from Putin to Prigozhin.

Putin was very happy to have the Wagner Group doing a lot of the dirty work that even the Russian military was not willing to do.

Suddenly Prigozhin turned on him and it looked for a minute as though there was going to be a full-on civil war in Russia.

According to The Washington Post, Prigozhin had been a fervent supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which makes sense since he was making a lot of money from that; Prigozhin played a central role in the war, first by deploying his mercenaries on the front lines and later by recruiting heavily from prisons to bolster Moscow’s depleted forces.

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Apparently, Prigozhin was angry because Sergei Shoigu, who is the Minister of Defence of Russia, was doing a terrible job, as evidenced by the fact that Russia was getting walloped all around Ukraine by a much smaller country.

Ukraine possesses more advanced military weaponry because it is funded by NATO; their military is actually more technologically advanced. Prigozhin accused Russian generals of stonewalling ammunition requests and as a result, blamed them for his fighters dying in heaps in Ukraine.

Or it could be that he was getting the ammo and stockpiling it in case he decided to actually march on Moscow.

The original perception was that Putin was going to put this rebellion down with force. But instead, Putin cut a deal. He seemingly wanted to avoid outright bloodshed between the Russian military and the Wagner Group.

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There was even talk that Putin had actually called in a mercenary group from Chechnya to put down the Wagner Group, which would have been a real problem for Putin, because it would make him look unbelievably weak.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were in celebration mode. Volodymyr Zelensky said in an evening address on Saturday the events in Russia showed “the bosses of Russia do not control anything.”

It may very well be true that Putin is weaker internally than he has been at any time during his 23-year rule of the Kremlin. But what comes next is anybody’s guess, because chaos in a nuclear-armed nation with roughly 5,900 nuclear warheads and a lot of weapons floating around right next to Europe could be a disaster.

All of this is somewhat reminiscent of a failed coup attempt back in 1991. It’s important to know your Russian history because very often, things that start off as a coup attempt actually turn out to be counter coups.

In 1991, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union was basically going to break up. He was placed under house arrest in his home in Crimea. The heads of the KGB, Interior Ministry, and the armed forces, together with his vice president, prime minister, and other Communist Party officials, tried to roll back the political and economic reforms Gorbachev wanted and stop the signing of the so-called union treaty, which would have essentially dissolved the Soviet Union by handing some authority back to the republics.

They declared themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency, according to the Centre for European Reform. As soon as this happened, there was a second coup because Boris Yeltsin, who was the president of the biggest Soviet republic, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, coordinated a resistance to the first coup.

But when he put down the coup, he also essentially deposed Gorbachev and became leader of the country.

So you just never know what’s going to happen when situations like this arise. Chaos inside Russia is not something to root for just because you don’t know the outcome.

People say, “Well, it has to be better than Putin.”

Let me introduce you to Russian history, where whatever was supposed to be better is generally worse.

You don’t know what’s happening in a nuclear-armed state, and that’s not great.

Ben Shapiro
Editor Emeritus,
The Daily Wire

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