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—” So he’s making a play for the throne.”

Looks to be quite a step up, there may be an iron ceiling just over his head.

Prigozhin the top chef that likes military uniforms?
He does not have a mil-spec history until his involvement with the Wanger Group.

The clothes thing can happen.
“The apparel oft proclaims the man”
Shakespeare
Or.
Kissinger’s glasses
https://youtu.be/xwY2CgIkduA

Becoming a top chef requires being a top manager; warfare is all about logistics, and he could get by with some OJT.
Strategy and tactics, hire the right people.

Do the clothes make the man or is this just another Potemkin village in the Ukraine?

Ukraine ping

DUMBGRUNT: [Becoming a top chef requires being a top manager; warfare is all about logistics, and he could get by with some OJT.
Strategy and tactics, hire the right people.

Do the clothes make the man or is this just another Potemkin village in the Ukraine?]

Logistics is basically accounting (awright, we’ll just call it operations research). Anyone who’s good with numbers can do logistics. Prigozhin’s half MOT on his dad’s side, which means he was halfway there just by being born. What a good war leader needs isn’t accounting skills, which are necessary without being sufficient - it’s the ability to see where the ball is going before it gets there, and cut it off at the pass. Based on the way he was steadily increasing his national political profile through his videos, I’d say he’s been inching towards this objective from the day the SMO launched.

Normally, in peacetime, Putin would have forbidden him from doing the videos for fear of building up a credible rival. But Putin needed surrogates to whip up enthusiasm for the war. He needed someone who sounded credible to say that the war, while difficult, was winnable, as counterpoint to the obviously unbelievable rah-rah accounts peddled by the tame Russian media, belied by the fact that, by now, just about every Russian likely knows someone who’s been injured or killed in the SMO. The downside for Putin isn’t just that Prigozhin has achieved fame among ordinary Russians - he’s possibly won the respect of a good chunk of the Russian military, many of whom could join him or simply stand aside if he chooses to make another run at the Kremlin.

Prigozhin had the misfortune to low-born in a country that almost only rewards aristocrats. That he snagged a ride on Putin’s bandwagon speaks either to his operational skills or his ability to flatter his social betters. The thing about courtiers is that all are pretty good at schmoozing. It appears that Prigozhin is that rare animal who’s good at something other than schmoozing.

There’s this idea that Wagner is just a security company. In reality, it’s basically an army division, except it reports directly to Putin*. It’s certainly never fought under any flag other than Russia’s. The mercenary tag is just for plausible deniability.

The difference between Prigozhin’s division and regular army divisions? He seems to command a loyalty from his subordinates that no other Russian military commander does. Not because of some ornamental cult of personality (typically wasteful eyewash that breeds antipathy rather than any real allegiance), but because (1) he makes sure they’re taken care of and (2) he wins. And that rep, on the basis of which Caesar’s men similarly followed him across the Rubicon, has made its way to regular army units. That makes him a very dangerous man, and necessarily #1 on Putin’s hit list.

* Having army units report directly to the leader isn’t that unusual. The Saudi National Guard reports directly to the Saudi King, quite separately from the regular army. More famously, the SS reported directly to Hitler, bypassing the Wehrmacht’s command structure. Wagner is one of a handful of Praetorian Guard units - the idea being that army chiefs who collude to depose Putin will have to fight Putin’s personal guard. There’s more than one Praetorian Guard so as to prevent any single unit commander from getting any ideas.

** Kamil Galeev sketches out Prigozhin’s biography at this Twitter roll-up:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672399934471954433.html