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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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As with most tyrannies - where we sometimes literally have to read from the tea leaves - this thing with Prigozhin is also quite an opaque situation. So far I gathered multiple possible explanations related to the crash, each depending on different assumptions and each opening more questions than it answers:

  1. Shooting down of the airplane was indeed a mistake, which feeds into the narrative that Russians are incompetent and all that.

  2. The plane was shot down by Prigozhin's enemy without Putin's approval. There are plenty of people in the army who can do this including low ranking soldiers. This escalates power struggle in Putin's orbit.

  3. The plane was shot down as a gift to Putin, a gift Putin did not want to recieve.

  4. The plane was shot down on Putin's direct order and with his full knowledge, but even then there are multiple possibilities related to the fact that it happened two months after the "coup"

  • 4a) Putin needed two months to try some alternative nonviolent path, it did not pan out so he took Prigozhin down. What did he try to do and why?
  • 4b) Putin needed two months to do something to Prigozhin's power base before he dared such an open move as shooting the plane down. Is Putin so weak that he could not do what he wanted sooner?

These are just a few possibilities and assumptions, you will of course see more including theories that the plane was shot down by Ukrainians or CIA or Prigozhin's enemies inside Wagner and who knows what else. The whole situation is a mess and nobody knows the truth. Which is a reason why we will see all sorts of people fitting the story to their already preexisting narrative. Beware.

you will of course see more including theories that the plane was shot down by Ukrainians or CIA

Considering the rather obvious symbolism of the incident happening on the Ukrainian official Day of Independence, I think this is the likeliest possibility.

3b. The plane was shot down as a gift to Putin, a gift that Putin has no problem with.

The plane was shot down as a gift to Putin, a gift Putin did not want to recieve.

My intuition is that this was the case.

4c) Putin waited this long because he wanted the guy to be sweating every day and night looking over his shoulder for when the hit would come and/or lull him into a false sense of security that he really was safe after this long, so he'd do something dumb like "get on a plane flying near Moscow".

All hypothesis seem somewhat valid, excepted the first. Like, there are a lot of plane flying in Russia. Perhaps less of them now with the sanctions, but still a lot. No civilian plane was downed for months or years if I'm not mistaken. So what is the chance that it happens to the one plane that has Prigozhin on board, just two months (day to day) after his revolt? Moreover, it would be a very weird mistake, because downing a civilian plane is the last thing you do after a long list of others. Seriously if it indeed was a mistake, I wish them luck to prove it because nobody will ever believe it.

Yep, the first one seems to be the official explanation so far. It seems implausible but it is the one that may be pushed, so we will hear about it.

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