Ukraine

SaintsFan11 said

How is that a solution? The Wagner soldiers are going to fall in line and be subsumed into the Russian military after their leader abandoned them for a big payday?

Seems like he would only have any security if he had the loyalty of a large group of armed soldiers. Now his life is in the hands of Lukashenko? A noted Putin lackey?

His soldiers would have to feel betrayed, no?

Nothing about this entire affair makes any sense whatsoever.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this is kinda where I'm at. Prigozhin's security is tied to his guys...unless he makes the quite reasonable calculation that it's only a matter of time before "his guys" are infiltrated (which they probably already are) and one of them offs him anyway.

This is all very nutty, but I don't see any scenario where this is a net positive for Putin. The only "good" is that he had to get rid of the in-fighting, and maybe he smoked out some of the weak links amongst his loyalists. Other than that, even though it was all a game of sorts, he's still hurt his standing, and subsuming the bits of Wagner that agree to go into the Russian army will ultimately mean dilution of one of the few decent fighting units that they had, not strengthening of the whole.

Just all very puzzling but, as I referenced in an earlier post, it doesn't have to make sense to a Western audience, just a subservient Russian one.