#1706 We publish a statement by Yevgeny Prigozhin:
“The other day, several political technologists came to me who worked at one time in various of my projects. And they said that they were going to start a telegram channel in which they would collect all the negativity about me and the Wagner PMC and explain where it came from and who invented it.
I have absolutely no objection, I have nothing to do with this telegram channel, but I won't ban or correct the guys either. It's even convenient. You can read all the negativity about me and the Wagner PMC in one place. The Telegram channel, at their request, is called KNS . As far as I understand, in construction language it is a sewage pumping station. To me, the name is great.”
https://t.me/concordgroup_official/1083
and here is the канализационная насосная станция:
KNS
12 315 subscribers
We, a group of political scientists, have decided not to ignore the huge number of negative statements against Wagner PMC and Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Here we will publish our own investigations and unravel the threads. From May 26 we will start work.
Some quotes from the first days:
According to the experience of the Great Patriotic War, prisoners ran away from the battlefield in huge numbers and were found to be ineffective. Prigogine achieved high efficiency of their work. And their losses do not reduce Prigozhin’s business qualities, since their disposal was one of the tasks facing him. As Prigozhin himself stated: their losses amounted to 20%, which is a meager figure compared to 80% of losses during the Great Patriotic War. According to confirmed information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the released prisoners had a 25-fold decrease in crime.
Prigozhin, in his public statements, calls for a fight against bureaucrats, thereby inflicting a severe blow on Nezygar’s “main” readers.
It is important to note here that Prigozhin always says “the so-called” special operation and frankly says that everything should have been decided in 2014, and not now, when it is too late. And very often reminds of failures in politics since 2014. The only thing that Prigozhin does not criticize is Putin's decision to launch a special operation.
In fact, only Prigozhin coped with the tasks set by the president, unlike the regular army, the Ministry of Defense and others like them.
https://t.me/sewage_system/9
According to our source from Tsalikov’s entourage of the Deputy Defense Ministry, after Prigozhin’s statement about the capture of Bakhmut, that is, on May 20, two meetings were held at once. The first is at the command headquarters in Rostov, and the second is on Frunzenskaya Embankment. The main question on the agenda was what to do with all this. They thought that by depriving the Wagner of ammunition, they would be able to do away with them, but everything happened exactly the opposite. Wagner won, its fighters became heroes.
The meeting lasted until midnight, among the voiced solutions to the “problem” were the following:
- accuse Prigozhin of lying, saying that Bakhmut is still not taken in its entirety;
- inflict precision strikes on the Wagners, but this idea was immediately dismissed, due to the good disguise of the “musicians”;
- Eliminate Prigozhin himself, and transfer command over PMCs to the army.
By midnight, a solution had not been found, so at midnight the Ministry of Defense had to inform Vladimir Putin that Bakhmut had been taken, and it was Wagner who had taken it.
After that, the light was on in Tsalikov’s office all night. He talked, among other things, with the head of the useless “cyber troops” Konovalchik. Together they agreed on information for Telegram channels, and at first they tried to publish this post in VChK-OGPU and in Brief, but they refused to accept it. But at 9 o'clock in the morning the distributor was found - “Moscow Laundry”.
Vladimir Putin personally gave Prigozhin carte blanche to destroy the ossified system, since it will no longer be possible to change and fix a broken machine. That is why the president has repeatedly supported the Wagner PMC, presented awards, and also congratulated the fighters on the capture of Bakhmut. This can be called a landmark event, since the head of state personally emphasized who exactly defended the city.
On May 22, 2023, a meeting between Putin and Prigozhin took place, at which the president agreed with Prigozhin to increase criticism of the elites. The reaction was not long in coming: the very next day, Prigozhin’s long interview with Konstantin Dolgov was published.
The thesis that Prigozhin is in conflict and undermines Putin's authority can be voiced for two reasons.
1. Delusion. This option is based on the assumption that Putin's team is something united and whole, and Prigozhin’s criticism is directed at the team as a whole.
No, the team is heterogeneous. First, there are representatives of competing political groups at almost every level. Secondly, there are different structures and divisions, there is also competition between them. Thirdly, there are interpersonal relationships between individual officials, regardless of influence groups and structures.
The SVO shows that the existing competitive struggle of officials (especially from the Ministry of Defense) does more harm. The desire to excel, to prevent the internal opponent from effectively completing the task, to emphasize the failure of the opponent - lead to casualties among our fighters.
Prigogine rightly emphasizes the merits of officials who are effective (Manturov, Surovikin, etc.), and criticizes inefficient ones (Gerasimov, etc.). The main purpose of criticism is that the team (even if heterogeneous) can perform its tasks, and not engage in internal struggle. This requires personnel decisions, which Prigozhin speaks about.
2. Deliberate promotion of the conflict thesis. This option is beneficial to many political actors both in the Russian Federation and abroad. Firstly, the desire to weaken the head of the most effective power structure is obviously beneficial to Western opponents. Therefore, we see attempts to form such an opinion among the elites of the Russian Federation in order to level the active participation of Prigogine in the NWO. And the absolutely right decision is to impose a conflict in the media space so that Putin makes an appropriate decision regarding Prigozhin. Secondly, the promotion of this thesis is also beneficial for some officials of the Russian Federation, who fear the effective manager Prigogine.
It looks as if Prigozhin is betting on a big event in the Kremlin. See https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4042550/posts?page=4387#4387
Thanks AdmSmith. There's a scene in "The Running Man" where Jim Brown's character corrects the Running Woman -- "Last season's losers." Those 26K convicts who've served Prigozhin with honor and been pardoned and sent home? All of them were killed in Wagner Group's dead-end campaign in Bakhmut, along with the 15K or so reported killed, making the WG's KIAs about 40K.