If Russia needed an excuse to launch all out war, now it has one. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:
The puny double drone attack – a combined Anglo-Saxon neocon provocation – has offered Moscow the perfect gift: an unmistakable casus belli.
Yevgeny Prighozin, the maestro of private military company Wagner, is never shy of also performing as a master communicator / troller / psyop specialist.
So no wonder when he delivered a recent rhetorical missile – here, in Russian, on War Gonzo – quite a few eyebrows were raised.
In the heat of war, and on the eve of the incessantly mythologized Ukrainian “counter-offensive” – which may or may not happen in myriad suicidal forms – Prighozin went on the record absolutely destroying the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), Minister Shoigu personally, and the Kremlin bureaucracy.
The bombshell revelations caused serial ripples among Russian experts yet not among the English-speaking crowd, which seems not to have grasped the enormity of it all, as Russian insiders who analyzed the whole interview in detail told me. Here is a noteworthy exception, focusing on the key bullet points.
Prighozin does flirt with a few absurdities, offered with no proof. Example: Russia didn’t win both Chechen wars; Putin paid Kadyrov’s father a bribe to wrap it all up. Or the assertion that the Debaltsevo Cauldron in Donbass did not exist; instead Poroshenko’s army simply made an orderly retreat intact.
Yet it’s the serious accusations that stand out. Among them: the SMO proved that the Russian Army is essentially unorganized, untrained, undisciplined and demoralized; there’s no real leadership; and the MoD lies, routinely, about what’s happening in the battlefield as well as about Wagner’s maneuvers.
