By now, if you haven't been living under a rock, you've heard all about the failed "coup" in Russia against Vladimir Putin.
I put the word coup in quotes for a reason. All available evidence indicates that it wasn't a coup at all. It was more of a temper tantrum.
You'd think that the hapless D.C. neocons, Antony Blinken and his boss, Victoria Nuland, plus the gang at Spook Central, would have learned a lesson about the diminishing returns of color revolutions: Namely, that these bold pranks blow back... and not in a good way.
The New York Times informs us that U.S. Intel was well aware weeks beforehand of the developing coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his personal army, the Wagner Group. Congressional leaders were briefed a day prior to its rollout.
Well, golly, can you suppose for a New York minute that Russia's intel agency didn't know all about it, too?
A vast array of explanations for this bizarre wartime vaudeville can be found in every corner of the internet. I'll go with this one:
Prigozhin came to bethink himself a Napoleonic figure. Just as Bonaparte wowed revolution-weary France with his military exploits against her enemies, and seized leadership of the nation, Prigozhin's mercenary army carried the brunt of the action in Ukraine this year, culminating in the heroic victory at Bakhmut.
Priggy regarded the Russian Ministry of Defense as oafish and, by extension, his long-time friend and mentor, Vlad Putin, indecisive about it. The moment was ripe to seize power! As a recent U.S. president might have said: he misoverestimated.
It looks like the neocons, the CIA, and Britain's MI6 did too, if they helped nudge the event to fruition with assurances and cash say, some of that $6.2 billion the Pentagon happened to find recently via an "accounting error."
What better time to destabilize Russia than during Ukraine's vaunted spring offensive (which, let's face it, was not going too well)? In fact, Ukraine's whole NATO-assisted project from the get-go looked like a bust. The Bakhmut "meat-grinder" was just the latest fiasco.
But then, the irascible, disgruntled and grandiose field marshal Priggy seemed like the perfect instrument to jazz things up for the demoralized West.
Pretty darn quick, on the road from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Priggy learned the hard way that he had no support in the government, the military or among the Russian public. The coup fizzled before sundown the very day it started.
Some say, any way you cut it, the result is Vlad Putin left looking weak and vulnerable. I don't think so. His speech to the Russian people that day appeared, if anything, resolute. And the way he seemed to spit out the words "a stab in the back," you couldn't think he was play-acting.
By evening, with the whole psychodrama concluded, the people of St. Petersburg crowded the quay along the Neva River and busted into patriotic song.
Let's address one nagging question: Why did Mr. Putin allow the Wagner Group private army to play the leading role countering the Ukraine offensive?
Here's one possible answer: He was saving and building up the regular Russian army to strength in the further event that NATO might finally jump into Ukraine when all else fails. Again, let me repeat that's just one possible answer.
We're left, of course, with the manifold mysteries of the coup's hasty resolution. Mr. Prigozhin, we're told, has been turned over to the custody of the Belarus President Lukashenko, to... to be done what with?
To be put on the shelf like a bowling trophy? I'm sure… If they can even find the bugger now. (I'd look in Africa, where sundry Wagner units have been operating Priggy must have had a plane standing by in Rostov.)
In any case, we know the rest.
Wagner troops who did not participate in the coup get folded into the regular army, and said regular army takes over duty along the front in Ukraine. Mr. Putin, despite all these insults, will continue to seek a practical end to all this nonsense. Will he get it? That remains to be seen.
But there are signs that cracks are forming in the increasingly janky NATO alliance.
The Wagner coup fiasco marks the true crackup of NATO as the Ukraine project fizzles. Surely Europeans with some functioning brain cells must be asking: "What was the point of all this killing and waste?"
The clear-eyed may suspect that the point was to get Europe to commit suicide, because that is the obvious result. No more natgas for you, Europe, meaning farewell to major industry and a comfortable standard of living. A lot less wheat and corn coming out of Ukraine to Euroland nations, too.
When food costs too much, or is just plain scarce, governments fall. Wait for it.
Can Ukraine carry on much longer? President Zelenskyy, the comedian, seems to have gone mad-dog now. He just canceled next year's election, which makes him... what? Dictator?
So much for America's democracy export program.
Zelenskyy has also issued warnings to the effect that Russia is about to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest. Such an act would supposedly trigger direct intervention by NATO, according to the policy promoted by warhawk U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal.
The nuclear plant is under Russian control. Mr. Zelenskyy says they have set mines in it. The scenario is pretty absurd. Nobody believes it. Of course, Mr. Zelenskyy might use some of his NATO missiles to zap it, but Russia has video surveillance and recording equipment at every angle around the joint and the world will know five seconds after how it was blown up.
From his latest photographs, it looks like Mr. Zelenskyy is in the terminal throes of a cocaine rapture, and his actions are consistent with that state of mind. He must know that he's not long for this world.
And our country, the USA, must know that this Ukraine gambit is another lost cause on our long march of military misadventures. And if the government of our country doesn't know, the people surely do.
Have you noticed the yellow-and-blue flags are not flying anymore? Even the most hard-core anti-Trump Democrats seem to understand what pounding sand down a rathole means when it comes to the many billions of dollars squandered on this stupid project while our cities rot and a whole lot more goes south in our own ailing homeland.
Not to mention the parlous position of the American president himself. I'm talking about the spectral "Joe Biden," skulking in his demon-haunted White House as evidence of his corruption mounts and mounts.
Which leaves us to wonder whether our Intel Community may have stirred up the Russia coup as just another distraction from its own Biden-linked crimes against this nation.
These days, nothing surprises me.
The Daily Reckoning