Just when you thought that the situation in Russia couldn’t get any weirder it surprises you. The latest development is that Prigozhin and his Wagner Group detachment are no longer on the road to Moscow but seem to be heading for Belarus. That’s about as much as we actually know.

There’s some speculation that Prigozhin has reached some sort of agreement with the Russian Ministry of Defense and/or the Kremlin but at this point that appears to be speculation. For that to be the case you’ve got to assume that a lot of the activity of the last several days has been theatrics. What do I mean by that? Prigozhin’s speech alleging that the MoD had attacked his men; Putin’s speech castigating Prigozhin as a traitor.

The official U. S. position appears to be that these events indicate how weak and disorganized Russia is. Maybe. We should know more in the next several days.

There’s something going on in Russia but for the life of me I can’t figure out what.

first, the head man of the Wagner Group mercenaries, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, made a speech complaining about the Russian Ministry of Defense’s handling of the war in Ukraine. In the Western press some are saying he denounced Putin but if you actually listen to the speech he didn’t mention Putin by name. Then the Wagner mercenaries marched into Roslov, a town in southern Russia, and basically took it over without firing a shot.

Then today Putin addressed the country, denouncing Prigozhin.

There have been various characterizations of the events as an attempted coup, a psyop, or a psychotic break. I don’t actually know what’s going on.

Overthrowing Putin might well bring an end to the war in Ukraine just not in the way that those calling for that in the West might want. Most of the Russian language complaints about the war I’ve come across have been complaints that they’re being too soft on the Ukrainians not that Russia should withdraw from Ukraine.

Perhaps the best comment on what’s going on was made by Niccolo Macchiavelli 500 years ago who warned about relying on mercenaries. Mercenary captains always have ambitions of their own.

Update

Joe Gandelman has a round-up of reactions to the Western media’s general ignoring of the situation:

The biggest international story of the day (the year?) broke on June 23, 2023 when Russia’s Wagner mercinary chief Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin said Russia’s war in Ukraine was based on lies and declared war on the Russian leadership, saying Wagner forces would destroy it. Russia ordered Prigozhin’s arrests on mutiny charges, while the Wagner group reportedly began advancing on cities.

The biggest cable news networks carried the story but remained focused on a parade of interviews on the tragic implosion of the Titan submerisble, which killed five people including the company’s CEO.

There used to be a saying in the days when print media was dominant: If it bleeds, it leads. Cable news seemingly has a saying: If it implodes, viewership explodes.

It wasn’t that cable was totally ignoring the story. But cable seemed unable to rearrange its priorities in the initial hours that the story broke to give it the priority it deserved.

Perhaps a referesher course in Journalism 101 might help. But cable’s Russian coup-attempt coverage was a reminder that many years ago broadcast news ceased being a cherished stewardship and became big bucks entertainment business.

Motivated, no doubt, by the ongoing state visit of Indian Prime Minister Modi with President Biden there are a number of opinion pieces on our relations with India. Indian ex-pat Fareed Zakaria uses his Washington Post column to urge a “people to people” relationship. He seems to have a realistic appraisal of the situation:

Modi is extremely popular in India and, what’s more, his Hindu nationalism is also popular. Like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Modi has tapped into an illiberal vein in India that scorns minorities, checks and balances, and liberal constitutionalism. In all these places, the nationalist-populist leader sets himself and his many followers against the old, secular, cosmopolitan elite that has ruled the country for decades. Truth be told, there is often much frustration with that elite, an establishment that seems disconnected from the heartland of the nation, from ordinary people and their ideas and emotions.

No wonder he urges a “people to people” relationship between the two countries:

Far better to ally with India’s society itself, expanding ties with its businesses, press, nongovernmental organizations, cultural groups and others. India is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, something that is palpable when you are there. Companies, students, scholars, activists — all want closer ties with the United States.

Unfortunately, he never tries to reconcile those two very different points-of-view. How can both Modi and the U. S. be popular? IMO the answer is to be found in the fact that about 3% of India’s GDP, a vast amount, comes from overseas remittances from Gulf states and the United States.

Sadanand Dhume’s Wall Street Journal column takes a somewhat different tack:

In the long term, India’s value as a counterweight to China depends on its getting a handle on economic underperformance and domestic unrest.

During Mr. Modi’s tenure, the economic gap between China and India has continued to widen. As recently as 1990, the two countries were roughly on par in per capita income. By 2014, the year Mr. Modi took office, China’s per capita income was 4.9 times India’s. According to the World Bank, by 2021 the average Chinese earned 5.6 times as much as the average Indian—around $12,550 compared with $2,250. India doesn’t need to match the Chinese economy to challenge Beijing along the two countries’ Himalayan frontier. But if the economic and technological gap continues to grow, prolonged confrontation may become unsustainable, diminishing New Delhi’s main value to Washington.

India’s ability to play a larger role on the world stage also depends on its ability to control domestic strife. Nine years after he became prime minister, Mr. Modi retains powerful appeal in the most populous parts of India. A Morning Consult poll regularly shows Mr. Modi as having the highest domestic popularity of the 22 global leaders it tracks. But the BJP’s strident Hindu nationalism has little appeal to the 1 in 5 Indians who follow other faiths. In recent years unrest has flared in Muslim-majority Kashmir, Sikh-majority Punjab and the northeastern state of Manipur, home to a large Christian minority.

concluding:

India is an important country, and the Biden administration is right to pursue closer ties. But unless Mr. Modi can find a way to close the gap with China and embrace all Indians equally, the durability of America’s bet on India will remain in question.

My own view is that the relationship between China and India is inherently if not adversarial at least competitive. We don’t need to foster that or harness it. It will be a reality whatever we do.

I think we should look at India much as we do Israel and for the same reasons. There are presently about 4 million Indians in the U. S. There are about 8 million Jews. Just as our Jewish fellow Americans are interested in Israel so are our Indian fellow Americans interested in India. American, Israeli, and Indian interests are not identical but they are congruent at times, in discord at others. Both Israel and India are becoming more nationalistic and less liberal. There is little that we can do about either of those developments. To me that means we should make common cause with both of them when we can but recognize that will not always be in our best interests.

At Newsweek Brendan Cole posts quotes from a Russian source that explain why Russia will lose the war:

In a video clip that has gone viral and tweeted by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, Girkin again lambasted Putin, saying, “our commander in chief is not going to win this war at all.”

“Whatever victories our army achieves in this war, we are going to lose it with this kind of approach of the country’s leadership,” he said.

In front of a red flag of Novorossiya, a historical name for southeast Ukraine popular among separatists, Girkin said that one year ago “the enemy was attacking nowhere and Russia had the initiative. What do we see now?”

“In June 2023, Kherson is abandoned, Izium is abandoned, Kupiansk is abandoned,” he said, criticizing how many Russian tanks had been destroyed “in only a few days.”

“He’s never seen a tank except in a parade, what’s wrong with his head?” said Girkin of Putin. “He’s really acting not even like an old man, but like a child.” He then took aim at the “unprofessional” and “uneducated” Russian high command which meant “we have no chance of winning.”

while at 19FortyFive Daniel Davis explains why Russia will win the war:

First, Russia had nine months to prepare some areas of the defensive belts and thus had time to make them very thorough and survivable. Second, as this war has routinely shown, attacking is much more complex than defending. Third, Russia has a number of critical military advantages over Ukraine that are very nearly impossible to overcome.

Moscow has near air supremacy in the tactical front over Ukraine; a significant edge in air defense systems; an advantage in the density of artillery rounds; superiority in electronic warfare capacity, which shows most clearly in Russia’s ability to deploy attack and reconnaissance drones while severely degrading Ukraine’s attempts to do likewise; a near-limitless supply of anti-tank mines; advantages in the number of armored personnel carriers and tanks; and the ability to launch sustained missile barrages against Ukrainian cities and fuel and ammunition depots near the front.

Critically, when needing to penetrate deep minefields in multiple belts, Ukraine appears to have grossly insufficient mine-clearing equipment. And perhaps above all, Russia has millions more men from whom to draw replacements, and a fully functioning military industrial capacity to keep the weapons of war rolling indefinitely.

These advantages are enduring and fundamental to determining who wins and loses wars, and there is nothing that will change them in the foreseeable future. Ukraine has been unable to advance to the main line of Russian defense in two weeks, yet the most difficult defensive fortifications are still to come: tank ditches, dragon’s teeth, massive minefields, and mobile counterattack formations in depth.

As I’ve said ad nauseam I have no idea how anyone can assess what’s happening. I continue to think that the advantage is with Russia and that the longer the war continues the greater that advantage will become.

I don’t know that I’ve ever cited The American Conservative before. Consider this snippet from Doug Bandow’s criticism of the phlegmatic stance of our European allies:

The visiting Europeans also claimed to fear a change in the global balance of power. To not “defeat” Putin, whatever that means—the debate is largely between reclaiming just the territory lost since last February and recovering everything seized before as well—would “show weakness,” I was told, and would encourage aggression by China as well as Russia.

In fact, even a ceasefire along current lines would be a defeat for Moscow. Rather than cow Ukrainian nationalism, Putin’s war intensified it. Rather than keep NATO away from Russia’s borders, his “Special Military Operation” brought Finland (and also will presumably bring, at some point, Sweden) into the transatlantic alliance. Moreover, European governments now talk about spending more on the military, a dramatic turnaround for many—though whether they carry through on their promises remains to be seen.

More important, while the conflict is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, it involves no substantial U.S. security interests. Ukraine has never mattered militarily to America. It was part of the Soviet Union for the entire Cold War, and part of the Russian Empire before that. Ukraine’s status is no more important for America today. While it matters more for the Europeans, that should be their responsibility, not Washington’s.

I would certainly be interested in hearing a counter-argument. An argument that we should support Ukraine’s creation of an ethnic state with its pre-2014 borders would be interesting, too.

If you’re not familiar with it, In These Times is a venerable explicitly leftwing publication. I recommend you read Wesley Lowery’s profile of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson there. It has a number of significant insights including some differences between Mr. Johnson and other members of the left. Here’s his conclusion:

“It will be fair to judge my administration around what our investments look like,” the mayor-elect tells me a couple weeks before his May 15 inauguration. ​“It will be fair to assess my administration around how those investments have impacted the neighborhoods more harmed by disinvestment. When my term is over, how did we manage our resources? I’m confident …”

That explains as well as anything why I’m not leftwing. I judge results based on outputs more than I do inputs. Although I’m willing to give him a try, I don’t think the first month of Mayor Johnson’s term has been particularly propitious. My judgment would be predicated on

• Rate of violent crime.
• Number of people and businesses leaving Chicago.

to name just a couple of things. I don’t much care how good his intentions are or how hard he tries.

At Project Syndicate Richard Haass compares and contrasts Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:

Last time around, the world rallied against aggression. Not now. For one reason or another, many countries are reluctant to oppose Russia. India buys its arms and oil, as do others.

Moreover, America’s ability to rally the world is much diminished, in no small part because respect for the US is much diminished, the result of its internal divisions and widespread global opposition to the US interventions in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011.

President Joe Biden’s administration didn’t help itself by insisting on framing the war as one of democracy versus authoritarianism. Much of the world is hardly democratic and may have responded more favorably had the US emphasized the threat to a country’s freedom from invasion, which most of the world’s governments do support.

What, then, is to be made of these differences? Geopolitics and great-power rivalry, common throughout history, are back, as is armed conflict between countries. The post-Cold War respite, the holiday from history, is over.

I’m really not the right person to remark on that since I opposed all three of those interventions (Kuwait, Iraq, Libya). It’s not that I had any particular fondness for Saddam Hussein—far from it. My preferences in descending order were a) a consortium of Middle Eastern countries should have removed Saddam from Kuwait; b) a UN force headed by France and Britain should have ousted Saddam; c) we should just let Saddam have Kuwait. BTW any claim that Muslim states are reluctant to fight one another is bushwah. Turkey has been at war with practically every Muslim state at one point or another.

And there’s a direct chain of causation between our involvement in the Gulf War and our invasion of Iraq. Don’t ask me to explain our activity in removing Qaddaffi from Libya—I can’t. I guess we did it because we could. But here’s my point: support our involvement in the Gulf War and you support our invasion of Iraq. The two cannot be separated. And for some reason he doesn’t include Afghanistan. Our lengthy sojourn there followed by a hasty withdrawal probably did as much to discredit us as Iraq and Libya.

I think that Mr. Haass’s explanation for the difference between the two cases ignores an important fact. In 1990 the U. S. share of world GDP (PPP) was 26%. Now it’s 16%. We’re just not as important as we used to be. As I’ve said before U. S. standing in the world is downstream from our economy.

William Galston uses his Wall Street Journal column to throw shade on the objectives that Ukrainian President Zelensky has stated as his objectives:

As Ukraine begins its long-awaited counteroffensive, the issue of what comes next has moved to the center of discussions within the coalition. Officially, the allies are committed to aiding Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” The underlying question: As long as it takes to do what? For President Volodymyr Zelensky, the answer is clear: As long as it takes to clear Russian troops from internationally recognized Ukrainian territory. For the alliance, I suspect, the answer is different: As long as it takes for Ukrainian troops to regain as much territory as possible, with the outcome of the current counteroffensive defining a possible perimeter.

Put simply, I believe that 2023 will be the decisive year for the war—and that by the end of the year, support for a cease-fire as a prelude to negotiations will become too strong to resist, even if some Eastern European allies doubt the wisdom of this course. I find it hard to believe that the coalition is prepared to maintain its current level of effort for a trench-warfare conflict lasting as long as World War I.

This hard reality will be a bitter pill for most Ukrainians, who are committed, understandably, to liberating every square mile of their territory. Mr. Zelensky has encouraged his people to believe that this goal isn’t only right but also possible. He can’t persuade them to accept less, unless his country receives binding interim security guarantees along a credible path to accelerated membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I have no idea how anyone can arrive at a reasonable assessment of what is going on in the war in Ukraine. If you read one set of sources, the Ukrainian counter-offensive now under way is succeeding famously; another set of sources declaims that the counter-offensive is already over, accomplishing little.

The editors of the Washington Post believe that the plea deal signed onto by Hunter Biden was justified:

That Hunter Biden will not spend time behind bars if the deal goes through is by no means exoneration. He’s pleading guilty to misdemeanors instead of facing a smorgasbord of charges that might or might not have stuck in a court of law. His laptop that became public in 2020 showcased questionable behavior, including dealings with a Chinese energy company. What’s more, Mr. Weiss said the investigation “is ongoing,” which indicates that issues beyond the tax and gun crimes are still under scrutiny.

The outcome appears similar to what other defendants might have gotten for similar violations of the law. Prosecutors will recommend two years of probation in exchange for Hunter Biden pleading guilty to two misdemeanors related to failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. He previously paid the IRS about $1.2 million to cover what he owed for unreported payments and gifts, a move to lessen his legal exposure.

Instead of pleading guilty to a gun charge, he will not contest the government’s allegations that he illegally owned a handgun in 2018 because he was simultaneously using illegal drugs. In exchange, he has agreed to enter a pretrial diversion program for substance abuse and remain clean for two years. Such diversion is routinely offered to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse struggles.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal remain unconvinced:

One question is why Hunter faced only “willful” misdemeanor tax charges rather than felony count of “tax evasion”—given April news reports that Mr. Weiss’s office felt it had enough evidence for the latter. It’s true DOJ has rarely pursued “lie and buy” gun cases—a longtime complaint of progressive gun-control groups. But DOJ has elevated its focus in recent years, and other attorneys have bragged about their aggressive pursuit of such cases.

There’s also the testimony by Internal Revenue Service agent Gary Shapley, a 14-year-veteran who oversees a team specializing in international tax crimes. The whistleblower says his team was assigned to the Hunter case in early 2020, and he “immediately saw deviations from the normal process.”

He says “multiple steps” were “just completely not done” and that “each and every time” decisions “seemed to always benefit the subject.” Mr. Shapley says when he pushed back, his team was excluded—and later removed—

I’m satisfied with the deal on the tax evasion and gun charges. The open question is whether this plea deal closes the matter or not. As the WSJ editors note:

DOJ said in a press release Tuesday that the “investigation is ongoing.” But Hunter’s attorney said “it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.” Which is it? Mr. Weiss ought to clarify matters and cooperate with Congress to put any suspicion of favorable treatment to rest.

The issues which are not included in this plea deal are actually the more serious. They include bribery, money laundering, and being an unregistered foreign agent. If investigations of those additional matters are still ongoing, well and good. If this plea deal concludes the matter, it stinks.