JEFF CHILDERS TAKE ON WAGNERGATE
Late yesterday afternoon, a sensational, full-on Proxy War propaganda storm hit the airwaves, and as usual, there is no way at all to know what to believe yet. The Wall Street Journal covered the exploding story this morning with the electrifying headline, “Russia’s Putin Orders Military to Crush Wagner Power Grab, Calls It Treason.”
Former ex-con and Russian businessman turned mercenary leader
The sub-headline explained, “President intervenes after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary group seizes city of Rostov in most serious challenge to Putin since he took power.”
The Wall Street Journal’s was the LEAST inflammatory headline. Headlines from other corporate media outlets were much more excited, calling what’s happening in Russia a “coup” and suggesting Putin may have already been arrested (again).
The “coup” story — which is 100% speculative at this point — was front and center on nearly every platform, with top sources running multiple articles analyzing the developing story from every direction.
But good luck finding any mention of Biden’s ongoing, well-established Bribery Case anywhere! Here’s how our friends at the New York Times framed it, with seven separate articles:
Nobody really knows anything. But to be honest, the Russians are serving up plenty of highly-suggestive material. Both Prigozhin¹ and Putin have published competing videos, a bunch of troops have moved around, Moscow is under martial law … but nobody’s reporting any real-life kinetic military encounters.
So WHAT is going on?
Russian has fooled the media before. The same Prighozin famously published a video claiming his troops were completely out of ammo — right before taking Bahkmut. During the now-failed Ukraine Spring CounterOffensive™, Russian forces repeatedly used a false-retreat strategy to dupe the Ukrainian forces. When attacked, the Russians would fall back in apparent disarray, leading the Ukrainians into a trap.
And the Ukrainians kept falling for it, over and over, till they’d lost.
Could this sudden “internal turmoil” could be a larger version of the same tactic? In other words, the Ukrainians, having all but conceded defeat of their glorious counteroffensive, are now being sorely tempted: should they scrape together a final all-out assault to take advantage of Russia’s apparent internal disarray?²
Before forming any opinions about what is or isn’t happening, just WAIT a few days, because this story appears to be a perfect psyop narrative — two giant personalities facing off against each other in a murky, high-stakes conflict: Putin versus Prigozhin. The whole contretemps could “resolve” with one phone call.
The one thing we know for sure is: we have no idea what’s really going on. Even though all of corporate media’s cherry-picked armchair military experts are completely confident, which is the usual giveaway.