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It sounds like you have been absorbing the narrative instead of looking at the concrete facts. In the big picture, nothing has changed. Russia has superior manpower and production. In a war of attrition Russia will eventually win unless the government collapses.
This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine, NATO wants regime change in Russia. It stands to reason that this coup attempt was in some capacity supported by NATO. If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD. Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig. We may never know. My prediction is that Prig lives for at least a few years.
It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).
The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.
It's somewhat besides the point. It was probably not a $6.2 billion ACH transfer. The point is that "aid" being given to Ukraine is not being tracked particularly carefully and bribery of Russian officials is hardly out of the question.
I don’t believe it was even an accounting error. It honestly sounded to me like they wanted to spend more money without announcing they were spending more money. I believe they changed some accounting from “replacement costs” to “historical costs” - which I think is just lifo accounting to fifo accounting.
Just so. There's a lot of creative accounting that can be done to make numbers look the way you want them to look. If you want to provide more aid but don't want to get a new authorization, just fiddle the books a bit.
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"Prigozhin accepted CIA bribe, coordinated with Putin to put on a good show until the bribe was paid, then turned back" is apparently popular on the Chinese internet, and fits what we do know pretty well. Russia letting its men be sacrificed in the ruse seems brutal, but it's not unheard of. Also possible that the helos could have have been destroyed without killing anyone, and the deaths manufactured as part of the ruse.
Prigozhin was possessed. Then he was exorcized, and then he recalled his troops. Fits pretty well, doesn't it? It's like epicycles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle
when ancients astronomers wanted to explain the movement of planets using geocentric system.
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No, it doesn't. Putin's legitimacy and power rest on the appearance of strength and stability. This proposes he decided to jeopardize that so an unruly subordinate could scam the CIA. That's far more of a stretch than "Prigozhin acted out of desperation and then lost his nerve or was persuaded/threatened into backing off."
It is never 5D chess.
Whenever someone claims that n-dimensional chess is being played in the FSU, my go-to response is "Gary Kasparov has repeatedly said nobody in the FSU is playing n-dimensional chess and the cock-up theory of history applies the same there as everywhere else - are you claiming to know more about chess than him?"
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NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?
This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.
And Putin has doubles.
No, triples! Why are you saying stuff that has zero relation to reality?
Because Biden said they wanted it. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3982406-we-need-regime-change-in-russia-but-how/
While Biden's obviously a checked out zombie who can be animated with a bevy of top shelf stimulants and given detailed instructions with the important bits in all capitals, he is still ostensibly the US president and so when he says things like “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” people assume he means that he doesn't want "this man" to remain in power - and that would obviously entail regime change.
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I'm not going to put in the effort to convince you, but it is my view that they have been pretty clear about this. Sure, NATO will never have a press release that says "DEATH TO PUTIN" but their actions and their propaganda has made the intent clear to me and many others. I am not intending to persuade you, but you merely contradicting me is not going to persuade anybody either.
I predicted day 1 that Russia was not going to take Kiev any time soon. Just because you fell for it does not mean that everybody did.
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I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.
Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.
I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.
I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.
Russia has a population of around 150 mil while Ukraine's population is around 40 mil. Russia simply has much deeper reserves to pull from. It is true that NATO is committing some production capacity to the Ukraine war, but it is still a fraction of what Russia is willing to commit. The Russian regime will fight the war of attrition until the regime collapse.
If Russia is able to consolidate on its territorial gains, this is decisively a win for Russia. It is not the total victory that they originally hoped for, but it is still a clear win based on the instigating causes of the war.
A lot of my favorite anon Twitter accounts said that the rebellion was overblown from the beginning and was a nothingburger. But still, it went farther than most people would have thought possible the day before. Given that NATO's win condition is regime change in Russia, the reason for suspicion is obvious.
It seems like Russia has more manpower reserves to pull from, but Ukraine is willing to pull deeper.
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