One of the side benefits of retirement is the amount of time that you have to devote to other interests. Volunteering, education, cooking and baking, community service, reading and your thoughts.
The thing about thinking and thoughts is that you get to speculate. I'm not talking about speculating in the investment world of stocks and bonds or commodities. I'm smart enough to avoid that like a case of the clap. I am referring to speculation as it applies to conjecture on a subject without firm evidence. There are times I like to indulge in speculation on political, social, geopolitical and related subject matter - local and otherwise. The good news is that it earned me the role of being a class coordinator for a current affairs class at the community college - a good thing. It also earned me the label of Armchair General as it relates to my musings on Russia. I don't believe it was intended as a pejorative; likely more out of frustration over my standing firm on hostile actors and performative politicians.
No big deal on my end as I get called plenty of names for standing firm. Besides, I am also an armchair gardener, armchair class coordinator, armchair pizza maker, armchair astronomer and so on. Last month I got a bartender license; add that to the list. Jack of many trades and master of none. You get the drift. But I digress.
A week has passed since Wagner Group strongman Yevgeny Prigozhin ended his march on Moscow thusly avoiding large-scale Russian on Russian bloodshed. In and of itself this was both disorienting and alarming. And after the passage of seven days I am unconvinced that any layperson has absolutely definitive knowledge about the causes for how events played-out. Although there is plenty of speculation.
For the record I haven't any inside information. Although it appears that Russian leadership has, temporarily at least, descended into the national equivalent of a dumpster fire.
Some observations and and idle speculation.
Was what transpired an elaborately staged deep fake? Was Prigozhin out to topple Vladimir Putin? I don't think so.
Was Prigozhin trying to save his business enterprise (his sweat equity in Wagner) from being subsumed into Russian command? And save his own scalp? These have possibilities.
Did he have co-conspirators in the Kremlin or Russian military? Will Wagner fighters follow their boss to Belarus? Will they return to carry the fight to Ukraine? Has Prigozhin triggered a Kremlin purge? Is this the end of Prigozhin or the beginning? All of this is anybody's guess.
What I think is that Prigozhin's folk hero send-off as he prepared to depart Rostov for life in Belarusian exile was a bad look for Putin. The normally reclusive Putin spent considerable time last week posing for staged selfies. It is impossible to know if events have left Putin weakened, strengthened or vindictive. Prigozhin has suggested that Putin's reasons for invading Ukraine were based on lies fed to him by the Kremlin's top brass; a fraud. Has this struck a chord with ordinary Russians?
A falling out amongst gangsters comes with all manner of loyalty complications; including, but not limited to, poisoning by means of polonium and falling from a sixth floor window. Gangsters typically feel compelled to reassert their primacy.
Either way you slice it Putin clearly does not have a succession plan in place and the notion of Russia (with all of its nukes) descending into civil war is unnerving. The dimmest of armchair generals understands this. It would probably be a good idea to give the Russians sufficient space to sort this out on their own.
Of course there's a candidate for POTUS who claims he can fix all of this in 24 hours. If any of you readers know what the recipe is for the Secret Sauce I'm all ears. Otherwise it's just more speculation.
In closing there is this. This last week Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hosted former U.N. arms inspector and convicted child sex predator, Scott Ritter on his podcast to rhapsodize over CIA conspiracy theories and defend Russian president Vladimir Putin as a man who will go down in history as one of the greatest leaders of all time.
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