please post any subsequent updates here unless they’re huge happenings. i just woke up and half our news front page is updates which is nice but also A Lot and most of these don’t have to be their own thread
The benefit is a distraction on the Russian military side, it may give the counteroffensive from Ukraine a tiny boost. The real impact is probably negligent, it’s not going to make any major changes.
Also, FYI: it’s not “Ukrainian invasion”, Ukraine isn’t invading anyone.
It’s full-on war between Ukraine and Russia.
The impact on this isn’t going to stop the war, only a surrender/peace agreement and full withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine’s 1991 borders will end the war.
Russians are used to swapping out regimes and leaderships all the time, so this may not change anything and the war against Ukraine can still continue under a different regime.
There’s no real “benefit” to Ukraine in this, is there?
Well, it appears that some of the baddies will be killing off each other, saving Ukraine the trouble.
Without the Wagner group, Russia will have much lesser professional troops on their side. And this entire thing could also have a severe impact on the morale of the soldiers.
If this goes on long enough it will most likely fuck up morale and put a considerable strain on the actual state army. That might give Ukraine time to at the very least recover. If the internal devastation is big enough whoever comes on as the next dictator might even have to technically end “the special operation” because there’s no resources to keep it going and they could do so while saving face, because it’s technically Putin and Shoigu’s fault for mismanaging everything. The totally best possible scenario is this happens, it takes them a few years to build the military back up and meanwhile Ukraine manages to get both in the EU and NATO, at which point attacking them again becomes a whole different deal.
That’s most likely a terribly unreasonably optimistic scenario. More likely whatever it is that’s happening right now takes a few days, either Putin or Prigozhin dies and things keep on going somewhat the same, regardless of who’s the de facto dictator. The country is mostly being ran by shady business interests that depend on the dictator, but if they agree on installing a new one could do it.
But Wagner boss said that the justification for the war is wrong and that Putin was tricked by the defense ministers to go into it in the first place. I highly doubt that they would continue a conflict they see no advantage to continuing. No, this won’t stop all wars but it might stop this one.
Exactly, this is the boss that was complaining to Kremlin and folks on telegram that they’re going to pull from Ukraine because Russian’s military isn’t supplying them with ammo.
They didn’t pull for months, still fought with “almost zero ammo”. They suddenly have ammo now? The same ammo they said they have zero of?
This is the “nothing” I was referring to, I didn’t say they didn’t do anything in general, I’m saying they said a lot of bullshit and did nothing of the sort. Thus, don’t believe what they say in public, because in the background, they’re doing something else.
I’ll clarify what I mean in the original post to “did nothing what they said they were going to do in public”.
I’d imagine there are benefits to them in that it weakens their enemy, because either Wagner loses, and therefore Russia loses the forces they represent, or they succeed, which would mean uncertainty and chaos among the regular army during the transition. There’s also potential for Russian forces to be weakened anywhere that Wagner was holding and removed troops from, or anywhere held by troops that get redirected to fight them, and off course that this will mean Russia takes losses and spends equipment fighting itself instead of Ukraine.
Actually, any new leader would likely leave Ukraine immediately. The war has been an overwhelming failure and embarrassment, and the new leader can blame the old leader for leading the country down that road.
Putin would leave too if he didn’t think that admitting defeat would get him killed.
Sounds like the Russian army is in total disarray at the moment.
