Latest on Prigozhin

The Americans think Prigozhin's plane has flown from Rostov-on-Don and landed in Minsk. 

If so and I were he, I'd leave for Africa as fast as possible.

I somehow doubt if Lukashenko really brokered a deal. But who knows? 

As Disraeli said, no man is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him. It became convenient to remember Lukashenko and Belarus.

Lukashenko said 'Don't make a hero out of me or Putin or Prigozhin', which suggests he is disclaiming any credit. 

He also said that it was painful for him to see the events (the revolt) 'because there is only one Motherland'. 

Is there? Does it include Belarus?

The reason why Prigozhin stopped his march is that he and his men would have been killed had they continued. 

His family would have been killed too.

Here is a reminder of the unpleasant crimes (mugging a woman, for example) for which he spent most of the 1980s behind bars. How I wish I had made it to Brezhnev's Russia.

Mark Galleoti has a very good explanation of the revolt and why it fizzled out (listen to the first ten minutes if you don't have longer). 

It was never 25,000 men but perhaps four thousand. Had they got to Moscow what could they have done except seize some buildings and have a hostage drama?

They did not have support for a takeover of power - did Prigozhin want to do this? Had he thought he had?

Timothy Snyder is a good historian, but severely limited by his liberalism (in the real, not American, sense of the word). From his latest substack:

'The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war -- Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again -- to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn't).'

Professor Snyder is right about war being useful as a distraction for Putin, as it is for Erdogan, but I don't buy the idea that Russians would do anything about inequality or the very rich if they were not distracted. That's a leftist mistake. If you substituted America for Russia and Iran or Iraq for Syria the sentence would also make just as much sense.

The following is true but not the whole truth:

'I'm not sure enough attention has been paid to what Prigozhin said about Putin's motives for war: that it had nothing to do with NATO enlargement or Ukrainian aggression, and was simply a matter of wishing to dominate Ukraine, replace its regime with a Moscow-friendly politician (Viktor Medvedchuk), and then seize its resources and to satisfy the Russian elite. Given the way the Russian political system actually works, that has the ring of plausibility. Putin's various rationales are dramatically inconsistent with the way the Russian political system actually works.'

'Russia is far less secure than it was before invading Ukraine. This is a rather obvious point that many people aside from myself have been making, going all the way back the first invasion of 2014. There was never any reason to believe, from that point at the latest, that Putin cared about Russian national interests. If he had, he would never have begun a conflict that forced Russia to become subordinate to China, which is the only real threat on its borders. Any realist in Moscow concerned about the Russian state would seek to balance China and the West, rather than pursue a policy which had to alienate the West.

'Putin was concerned that Ukraine might serve as a model. Unlike Russians, Ukrainians could vote and enjoyed freedom of speech and association. That was no threat to Russia, but it was to Putin's own power.' 

This is partly true but Ukraine was not very attractive before the invasion. 

Mr Snyder misunderstands how countries outside the liberal world behave. Putin did not want the Sevastopol naval base to be in Nato territory. Snyder's very American liberal world view means he cannot see why.

On the other hand, he is right about China being the threat to Russia. Nature abhors a vacuum. Siberia is empty and lies next to the most populous country on earth.

Meanwhile, the long expected Ukrainian spring offensive, delayed to June, has come to very little in three weeks. Today the Ukrainian government says they are making gains. The Anglo-American media repeat this uncritically. 

What is the point of the offensive? I never understood, really.