World News Random, Random

[Suliso]

It still kind of is, but you need more time and experience to sort out truth from clickbait. News organizations, even very good ones, will not be always in the right place at the right time. There are a lot of bots, particularly Russia-Ukraine war related, but after following for some time limited number of posters one notices anyway who's just talking and who's news/opinions are later confirmed by mainstream media or some other hard evidence. Not a 100% fool proof way, but it's the best one could do.

[mmmm8]

I've mostly been getting information from (independent) Russian media - they're mostly outside the country, but they engaged journalists and witnesses on the ground. Almost all the international media I tried that were offering continuous coverage of this (all European) had reporters reporting from Ukraine and not Russia. The exception today was Al Jazeera, they seemed to have the best coverage.

[mmmm8]

Anyway, it's over now, I guess? Lukashenko says he got the deal...

Wagner troops are leaving Rostov.

[Suliso]

I just can't believe all will be forgiven here. Prigozhin made Putin look very weak and also his forces shot down 6 military helicopters while on the dash to Moscow.

[mmmm8]

They reportedly found boxes of cash in a van outside his offices. Reportedly $4 billion rubles (USD 48 million).

[mmmm8]

I just can't believe all will be forgiven here. Prigozhin made Putin look very weak and also his forces shot down 6 military helicopters while on the dash to Moscow.

But also what happens to Wagner troops now? They make up about 12% of the armed forces in Ukraine reportedly.

It's all very confusing. He never had any specific demands in his "march of fairness," the whole thing is odd.

[ti-amie]

‘I hope he wins’: how tense Rostov-on-Don residents welcomed Prigozhin’s forces
In the southern Russian city, the Wagner group boasted of taking key buildings without firing a shot amid an uneasy calm

Andrew Roth
Sat 24 Jun 2023 20.12 BST


Fighters of Wagner mercenary group stand guard in a street near the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on Saturday. Photograph: Reuters

As forces from Wagner occupied key buildings in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don in Russia on Saturday, some local residents met them as heroes, bringing them water and sweets even as Russian president Vladimir Putin decried their armed insurrection as a “stab in the back”.

“Finally, we can welcome them home,” said Evgeny, 36, a supporter of the war who has been among those crowdfunding and ferrying goods into occupied Ukraine. “The army has been fighting incorrectly from the beginning and they put too much [pressure] on these guys. In Bakhmut, everywhere. And you see what happens? Our own army is trying to stop us from winning this war.”

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who essentially launched a coup targeting the defence ministry before later calling off the action, was acting “totally correctly”, he said. “I hope he wins.”

Videos from the city showed soldiers in full tactical gear being feted by locals taking selfies with infantry fighting vehicles, shaking hands and otherwise adapting to the new reality in a Russian city in effect occupied by the country’s largest paramilitary force.

Evgeny, like others, said the situation in the city was “calm, but tense”, but said that the armed men, who likely include trained mercenaries and convicts recruited from prisons, were behaving “adequately”. Two other people in Rostov-on-Don contacted by the Observer said that they were “nervous” about the troops but that things were calm for now. They were worried about the potential for a clash with regular troops in the coming days.

On a busy street corner, Lyudmilla, a woman in a sundress, brought a packet of biscuits to a Wagner soldier standing guard outside a local municipal building. Another man brought the soldier a bottle of water.

“Why am I bringing food? Because we are kind people,” she said on camera. “It’s not just me doing it. People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers.”

But some locals reacted extremely negatively to the arrival of the Russian mercenaries. “Have some shame! Are you the protectors of our fatherland or not?” said one man pushing a bicycle past five Wagner fighters. “Why are you starting this mess here?”

Prigozhin, who has been cultivating the image of a populist who speaks truth to power, will need public support if he has any chance of surviving the aftermath of what Putin called his “internal mutiny” and “treason”.

“Why does the country support us? Because we have come with a march of justice,” Prigozhin said in a voice memo that he released on his Telegram account yesterday morning. “We have come without shooting, we haven’t touched a single conscript, we haven’t killed a single person … We took the headquarters in Rostov without firing a single shot.”

Gunfire and explosions could be heard around the military headquarters yesterday afternoon, as video showed a crowd of people at one point running away from the site. Other clashes have taken place on the city outskirts, and an oil depot in Voronezh was set alight. Prigozhin deployed some of his forces in a surprise raid towards Moscow, but later ordered them to halt “to avoid bloodshed”.

But overall, life in Rostov-on-Don continued somewhat normally yesterday. In the centre, a man played on an accordion, while locals milled past the armoured personnel carriers that Wagner had ridden in on. Other footage showed Wagner soldiers stocking up on supplies at the local supermarkets and buying lunch at the Russian version of McDonald’s.

Many others appeared angry about the soldiers’ arrival. “I’ve always admired you, why didn’t you go to Moscow?” one man asked a Wagner fighter as 20 other people looked on. “I always supported them as long as they were fighting.”

“I think everybody just wants calm, they want to be left alone,” said Dmitry, a driver from a small city near Rostov who visited the city on Saturday and saw the Wagner troops. “I can’t say many people really support them or not. They’re also angry about the war and how it is going.

“Most importantly people don’t want the city to become like Belgorod, like Shebekino,” he said.

Belgorod, a city further north, has been shelled several times in the course of the war, but life there largely goes on as normal. Shebekino, a town on the border with Ukraine, has largely been evacuated, as shelling and cross-border raids by anti-Kremlin militants have raised fears that the Kremlin can no longer defend its border cities.

What could happen next will depend heavily on Wagner’s next moves. Wagner could face stiff resistance if it moves on Moscow, but if it chooses to dig in in Rostov, then that could lead to a protracted fight with the military. “It would get messy,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at the Center for Naval Analyses.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ner-forces

[ti-amie]

Wagner rebel chief halts tank advance on Moscow ‘to stop bloodshed’
Putin denounces former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ‘treason’ as mayor tells capital’s citizens to stay at home
Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer
Sat 24 Jun 2023 19.30 BST


Wagner troops on the streets of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday after taking the Russian city without any resistance Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Russia last night appeared to have averted an immediate descent into civil war after mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said he would order his Wagner fighters to end their march on Moscow and return to their bases in southern Russia.

At the end of an extraordinary day, during which a visibly angry Vladimir Putin had made an emergency television broadcast railing against the “deadly threat to our state”, Progozhin said that he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood and would order his troops back to their bases instead.

“Now the moment has come when blood can be shed,” he said. “Therefore, realising all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed from one side, we will turn our convoys around and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.”

The decision followed negotiations with the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, both Prigozhin and Lukashenko’s press services reported. The terms appeared to include an amnesty for Wagner fighters who had participated in the insurrection, although it was not clear whether Prigozhin would still face punishment for his role in launching what was in effect the country’s first armed coup in decades.

“The negotiations lasted throughout the day,” Lukashenko’s press pool reported. “As a result, we came to an agreement on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia.”

The Kremlin had earlier been forced to mobilise its forces and prepare defences as Prigozhin sent a convoy of armed troops towards Moscow.

Officials dug anti-tank ditches into federal highways, erected machine-gun emplacements at the city limits, and deployed infantry fighting vehicles on the streets of Moscow, while Putin vowed that the Russian state would deal brutally with its largest armed insurrection since the fall of the Soviet Union.

As the mercenaries’ convoy headed towards the capital, Moscow residents were urged by the city’s mayor to stay at home. Sergei Sobyanin said that Monday would be a “non-working day” in order to “minimise risks”.

The convoy of lorries, infantry fighting vehicles and other military hardware had been hoping to take advantage of the element of surprise and reach Moscow before it was intercepted by a larger detachment of Russian regular troops, according to analysts and military bloggers.

Putin appeared on television earlier on Saturday in an emergency broadcast, issuing a nationwide call for unity in the face of a mutinous strike that he compared to the revolution of 1917.

“Any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state, to us as a nation,” said a visibly angry Putin.

Prigozhin, the Putin ally who had amassed power and influence as the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, had declared war on the Russian ministry of defence, seizing the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shooting down three military helicopters in what he called a “march of justice”.

Armed by the Kremlin to fight in Ukraine, the maverick warlord was now redirecting his forces at his enemies inside Russia in the most serious threat to the Kremlin since the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt.

In his televised address on Saturday morning, Putin said “the fate of our people is being decided”, accusing the Wagner group of “armed mutiny” and vowing to “neutralise” the uprising.

“It’s an attempt to subvert us from inside. This is treason in the face of those who are fighting on the front,” Putin told the Russian public. “This is a stab in the back of our troops and the people of Russia.” The response, he promised, would be “brutal”.

In videos posted on social media early on Saturday, Prigozhin, who late on Friday vowed to take revenge against the Kremlin’s military leadership, said he was at the headquarters of the Southern Military District (SMD) in Rostov-on-Don and demanded the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, come to the city, 1,000km south of Moscow.


Wagner fighters in Rostov on Saturday. Photograph: Reuters

In a bizarre scene, Prigozhin appeared alongside two senior Russian generals who appeared to have been forced to film a video with him as he demanded that the top brass come down to Rostov for negotiations.

“We have arrived here; we want to receive the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” Prigozhin said in one video. “Unless they come, we’ll be here; we’ll blockade the city of Rostov and head for Moscow.”

In Ukraine, where three people in Kyiv were killed in Russian airstrikes overnight, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, commented: “Everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself. Whoever throws hundreds of thousands into the war, eventually must barricade himself in the Moscow region from those whom he himself armed.”

In the UK, a Cobra security meeting was called and in Estonia, which neighbours Russia, the prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said there was strengthened security on the border.

Putin, meanwhile, sought to calm jittery allies, speaking with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Officials in the Moscow were said to have been blindsided by Prigozhin’s betrayal and declaration of war on the defence ministry. “It’s real shock and hysteria, nobody understands what to do,” a former defence ministry official told the Observer, citing his conversations with former colleagues.For the first time on Saturday he also directly criticised Putin, saying the RUssian leader had been “deeply mistaken” in calling him a traitor.

Prigozhin claimed to have seized the SMD headquarters “without firing a shot”. Automatic gunfire and several explosions were heard later in the day in Rostov-on-Don, as Wagner sought to dig in by laying mines and establishing checkpoints in the city centre.

Prigozhin’s forces appeared to have taken the military by surprise, at least for now. “It’s still early,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Asian news channel CNA. “They took advantage of a situation where there was probably confusion and a lack of orders.”

Late on Friday, Prigozhin claimed a Russian rocket attack had killed scores of his fighters, and he vowed to take “revenge” and “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of the country”. In a virtual declaration of war against his rivals in Russia’s military, Prigozhin said he controlled 25,000 fighters and together “we are going to figure out why the chaos is happening in the country”.

“Anyone who wants should join. We need to end this mess,” he said.

Russian security services have moved swiftly against the Wagner boss, denouncing Prigozhin for “treachery” and ordering the mercenary group’s fighters to detain their commander. They raided a Wagner headquarters in St Petersburg on Saturday, seizing boxes of cash estimated at £37m.On Saturday morning, Prigozhin was seen meeting Russia’s deputy defence minister and the deputy head of the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence directorate. In the clip, Pirgozhin said he planned to march on to Moscow, adding that he had shot down three Russian helicopters that tried to resist him.

Several senior Russian officials called on the country to unite behind Putin. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, urged Russians to rally around the president, while the head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, led a prayer for Putin. Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya who is a powerful ally of Putin, called Prigozhin a traitor and said he was sending Chechen troops to squash the mutiny.

As of Saturday afternoon, Prigozhin now looks isolated, with several former military allies denouncing his rebellion. But his troops appeared to have taken Rostov without any resistance and questions will rise over the military’s loyalty.

“It is tough to gauge current loyalties at the moment. I am confident that the military hierarchy stands with the government, and there won’t be any switching of allegiances,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R Politik. “Yet, lower in the ranks, it’s a different story. If orders to open fire are issued, how will individual soldiers react?”

Britain’s defence ministry said on Saturday that the Russian state was facing its greatest security challenge of recent times, following what it said appeared to be a move by Wagner group mercenary forces towards Moscow.

“Over the coming hours, the loyalty of Russia’s security forces, and especially the Russian National Guard, will be key to how this crisis plays out,” Britain’s defence ministry said in a regular intelligence update.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy, said the events in Moscow showed that the “Ukrainian counteroffensive finally destabilised the Russian elites, intensifying the internal split that arose after the defeat in Ukraine”.He added: “Today we are actually witnessing the beginning of a civil war.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... zhin-putin

[ti-amie]

The latest updates from The Guardian


2m ago
16.11 EDT
The Wagner mercenary force chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, will move to Belarus under the deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end the armed mutiny that Prigozhin had led against Russia’s military leadership, the Kremlin said on Saturday night.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Lukashenko had offered to mediate, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agreement, because he had known Prigozhin personally for around 20 years.

6m ago
21.02 BST
Summary
It’s about 11 pm in Moscow. Here’s a quick overview of everything that’s happened so far today:

In an abrupt about-face, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin halted his mercenary troops and ordered them to move out of Rostov. In a statement, Prigozhin said that he wanted to avoid the spilling of “Russian blood”.

Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko's press office was the first to announce that Prigozhin would be backing down, saying that Lukashenko had negotiated a de-escalation with the Wagner head after talking to Vladimir Putin. Lukashenko said that Putin has since thanked him for his negotiation efforts.

Putin has not publicly commented on Lukashenko’s deal with Prigozhin.

Before Prigozhin called back his troops, Wagner had entered the Lipetsk region, about 360km (225 miles) south of Moscow, overnight. Putin had reportedly taken a plane out of Moscow heading northwest in the afternoon, though it is unclear where he went or his current whereabouts.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... a43c43fba5

[ti-amie]

Nina Khrushcheva is Nikita Khrushchev's grand daughter?

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

And the speculation begins


Seth Abramson
@sethabramson@bird.makeup
I’m not saying this happened—at all; there’s no evidence of it—but if you told me Putin had secretly offered Prigozhin the presidency of Belarus (in place of Lukashenko, who Putin can kill at any time) *that* I could buy as sufficient incentive for Wagner instantly standing down.

(After all, Prigozhin already has his army, he just needs a country to rule with it.)

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

Excuse me for being ignorant in Russian matters, but: does this guy Prigozhim really believe that Putin will let him live after this? That is not in the manual for dictators.
This guy bought himself some time; he won't be dead tomorrow, but I would never take another morsel without somebody else biting it first and then waiting a good 1/2 hour, nor I would go anywhere above a first floor.

[ti-amie]

As for being ignorant about Russian matters:



If, and it's a big if based on exactly what the person is saying in that tweet, if the head of Wagner survives if I'm Lukashenko I'd be taking the same precautions. Don't forget the gloves though. Didn't someone get poisoned by something on his door knob in London?