Jim Geraghty
National Review, June 28, 2023
“Brutal Maniac, Working with Other Brutal Maniac, Fails to Depose Chief Brutal Maniac.”
An Unprepared Putin
Many aspects of this weekend’s short-lived coup attempt in Russia remain mysterious, but the Wall Street Journal’s Bojan Pancevski, the paper’s Germany correspondent, sheds a little light on what Yevgeny Prigozhin wanted to do:
Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that the two were planning. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, found out about the plan two days before it was to be executed, according to Western officials.
One big, almost mind-blowing question is how Prigozhin and the Wagner Group could effectively “sneak up” on a leader as spectacularly paranoid as Vladimir Putin. Perhaps Prigozhin helped his cause by hiding in plain sight, constantly complaining on social media about the incompetence of the Russian Defense Ministry. If Prigozhin is always publicly and loudly raging about Shoigu and Gerasimov, perhaps his opposition to those leaders starts to sound like inconsequential background noise.
For what it’s worth, General Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard of Russia, a domestic military force that reports directly to Putin, told Russian state media that he knew about the coming coup: “Specific leaks about preparations for a rebellion that would begin between June 22-25 were leaked from Prigozhin’s camp.”
