With poor middle-level leadership and an inability to integrate all their capabilities into a coherent and cohesive force, the invasion by Russia's army has been reduced to defending static positions and reverting to the Russian default instrument of battlefield power: bombardment.Īs Ukrainian forces probe Russia’s defenses to find spots weak enough to exploit in a counterattack, one is driven to a conclusion that Putin may have already considered: a negotiated settlement that legitimizes Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbas.īut even to accomplish this, Putin seems to require Prigozhin’s services, and that alone, plus Putin’s forbearance of Prigozhin’s bravado, may have been the impetus for Prigozhin to flex his muscles. The most interesting thing about Prigozhin’s apparent retreat is that Putin, widely perceived as a strongman with a low threshold of pain for disloyalty, has permitted Prigozhin to flourish and to criticize the Kremlin in the first place.Īfter all, a startling number of Putin’s political adversaries - many without the high profile of Prigozhin - have succumbed to poison or fallen to their deaths from tall buildings, and it is intriguing to speculate why Putin has suffered Prigozhin and his antics.Ī compelling explanation is that Putin can’t do without the Wagner Group, Prigozhin’s army. Prigozhin on Friday accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering a rocket strike on Wagner’s camps in Ukraine, and vowed to punish “those who destroyed our lads.”.Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group and once a confidant of the Russian leader, claimed that he and his fighters had taken Rostov-on-Don, where the Russian military headquarters overseeing the war in Ukraine is based.Russian President Vladimir Putin had accused mercenary Prigozhin of 'treason' and vowed to crush the growing armed rebellion.In a Telegram post, the news agency reported that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, also said Prigozhin would 'go to Belarus' and that Wagner fighters would not be prosecuted. Tass, a media outlet run by Russia's government, reported the criminal case against Prigozhin would be dropped.In a post on Telegram, Prigozhin said the move was done to avoid bloodshed. Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said Saturday he had ordered his forces to turn back and return to their bases, seemingly abandoning an armed rebellion that had them heading toward Moscow.What to know about the situation in Russia

Free downloads World of War Tanks