I wrote the previous article when the March On Moscow was still going on, and I had explicitly compared it to the Kornilov Coup of 1917. If anything, 24 and a bit hours after it ended, the comparison is more apt than ever. Consider:
1. Both Prigozhin and Kornilov would never have carried out their coup attempts unless they had reason to believe that they had substantial support in the capital. Kornilov thought he had been asked by Kerensky to purge Petrograd of all the revolutionary groups and "restore order". Prigozhin, you can be absolutely certain of this, could never have believed he and his 8000 or so men* would have been able to capture power or even impose terms such as the removal of Shoigu and Gerasimov unless he thought he had substantial support in the capital and the government. It is not possible.
2. In both cases the movements fizzled as participating troops dropped out and the support failed to materialise.
3. Both Kornilov and Prigozhin could well be deemed guilty of high treason, but both were let off with a slap on the wrist (in Prigozhin's case it can't even be called that).
[*Just 8000 of the at least 33000-strong Wagner took part in the March On Moscow, and it appears most of those 8000 didn't even know what they were really doing. They thought they were being redeployed. And all of them are now to be brought under the Ministry of Defence (MoD), not punished in any way.]
The question I want answered is this:
How is it possible, is it at all credible, that the MoD didn't know what was happening?
Wagner was set up with the help of Russian military intelligence, GRU. It is staffed with regular military and GRU officers, and most of its troops are former regular soldiers, not the "convicts with shovels" fantasies of the Westernaganda. Its so called "deputy" commander, General Mizintsev, was until very recently logistics commander in the Artëmovsk front before overnight turning into a Wagner top officer. Its Soledar and Artëmovsk field commander, call sign Lotus, is a former regular officer who's fought in Syria, Libya, and the Central African Republic before this. Neither Lotus nor Mizintsev participated in the putsch; the only known Wagner leader bar Prigozhin who did was the shadowy Dmitri Utkin, who may actually be Prigozhin's boss.
So how is it possible that the MoD didn't know what was in the offing?
Simple answer: it could not have not known. It is a sheer impossibility.
That's apart from the video now going around from a few weeks ago of an interview between the Russian military blogger Wargonzo (real name Simën Pegov) and Prigozhin where the former outright tells Prigozhin that the MoD is restricting Wagner's ammunition to prevent it from conducting a coup in Moscow. The MoD knew, all right.
So
why didn't it do anything about it?
Many people online are operating on the assumption that this proves this was a coordinated farce between Putin and Prigozhin. I have no reason to believe that, simply because the same thing could have been achieved without any "coup" attempt. The only other explanation I can think of is that the coup was permitted to go ahead, and fizzle, to put Wagner under the MoD, just what Prigozhin had been resisting all along.
There is a fourth similarity to the Kornilov Coup I'll predict:
105 years after the Kornilov Coup we still don't know for sure what happened.
We won't find out this time either.
