by ANDREW KORYBKO
Had President Putin reacted differently to Prigozhin’s coup, then the Union State could have already dissolved by now in the event that NATO formally invaded Belarus while Russia was plunged into civil war, which might have coincided with Kiev reviving its failed counteroffensive to reconquer all of its lost regions.
Two developments on Tuesday lend credence to suspicions that Prigozhin was functioning as the West’s “useful idiot” by attempting his coup over the weekend. CNN cited unnamed US sources who informed them that their country’s intelligence agencies had “extremely detailed” knowledge of his plans, “including where and how Wagner was planning to advance”. After the march began, the US ordered its allies to “remain silent and not give Putin any opening” to blame them for his armed rebellion.
The outlet’s inside sources also alleged that “Ukrainians were being cautioned by allies to not to provoke the situation” because “You just don’t want to feed into the narrative that this was initiative by us.” These revelations very strongly suggest that the West intended to exploit Prigozhin as their “agent of chaos” against Russia because they expected him to provoke a lot of bloodshed, the prediction of which was shared by one of CNN’s other unnamed sources in a prior report after the incident ended.
In other words, his coup was planned entirely “in-house” without any foreign collusion – unless the Russian security services unearth evidence proving otherwise – but was detected by US spies in advance, who refused to tip off Moscow about it in order for him to destabilize their rival. Throughout the course of his attempted regime change, the US demanded that its vassals not “rock the boat” like CNN’s sources phrased it in order to prevent Prigozhin from stopping if he realized that he’d become their “useful idiot”.
This insight should prompt observers to reassess whatever they may have thought in the middle of last month after the Washington Post (WaPo) claimed to have obtained previously unreported documents from the Pentagon leaks alleging that Prigozhin was secretly in cahoots with Kiev. Knowing what’s now been disclosed by CNN’s sources, this was arguably an information provocation aimed at exacerbating the rivalry between Wagner and the Defense Ministry (DM) with the intent of sparking a hot conflict.
Prigozhin might have thought that the DM concocted this false story that was later supposedly picked up by US spies in order to manufacture the pretext for imprisoning him, while the DM might have thought that there’s some truth to it so they should do precisely that as soon as possible. Moreover, by leaking allegations that damaged Prigozhin’s reputation, the US via WaPo wanted to portray him in a positive light from the perspective of average Russians who believe the opposite of whatever the US says.
The suspicion that he was the West’s “useful idiot” becomes even more compelling after listening to what Belarusian President Lukashenko said on the same day as CNN’s latest report. He updated everyone about his warning from earlier this month regarding the West’s plans to attempt another coup against him to inform them that this scenario was about to be set into motion over the weekend but was stopped. Quite clearly, the timing of the Belarusian coup was supposed to be connected to Prigozhin’s.
With him functioning as the West’s “useful idiot”, and their intelligence detecting his plans in detail far ahead of time to the point of learning where and how he was planning to advance, it makes perfect sense that they’d coordinate a complementary coup attempt in Belarus to coincide with his. This wasn’t unreasonable from their strategic perspective either since they wrongly expected that there’d be a bunch of bloodshed in Russia per CNN’s previously cited source.
Premised on the prediction that Russia would be deeply destabilized for the indefinite future or at the very least be dealt such a powerful strategic blow to its stability that it would be forced to immediately turn its focus inward to survive, they decided to move their Belarusian coup plans forward for that time. It’s unclear what went wrong and why none of their proxies there attempted something similar to what Prigozhin did, but it could have been that they were waiting until Saturday night to begin.
After all, there hadn’t been any serious clashes between Wagner and the Armed Forces apart from the former shooting down some of the latter’s pilots like Prigozhin later admitted on Monday, after which President Putin honored the martyrs in his national address later that same evening. Since no large-scale bloodshed had occurred on the ground as Wagner marched towards Moscow, the Belarusian plotters were likely told to hold off until after that happens and everything in Russia is thrown into chaos.
What the West never expected was President Putin mercifully giving Prigozhin a final chance to save his life by going into exile to Belarus with his collaborators, which served Russian interests in more ways than one like was explained in this analysis here. This deal took the Union State’s enemies off guard after their experts had already preconditioned the public to expect the worst scenarios, which is why the West called off its Belarusian proxies and then had its domestic ones pivot to spreading conspiracy theories.
