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August 23, 2023

Putin plays for keeps

By Monica Showalter

In a chronicle of a death foretold, Wagner Group mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed along with nine others in a corporate plane crash, flying over Tver, a city just south of Moscow.

According to Fox News:

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia's Wagner Group who challenged the rule of Vladimir Putin just months ago, was involved Wednesday in a plane crash that has left 10 people dead outside of Moscow, state media is reporting.

The business jet was traveling from the Russian capital to St. Petersburg went it went down in the Tver region, according to the TASS news agency.

"Prigozhin was listed among the passengers, according to the Federal Air Transport Agency," read a post by TASS on Telegram. "An investigation into the crash of the Embraer aircraft has been launched, the department noted."

It's not immediately clear whether Prigozhin is among the 10 reported to have died in the crash. 

Sure, it could have been something weird -- a staged death or something.

But I recall reading the forecast that Prigozhin was a dead man walking as an absolute certainty when his mutiny against Vladimir Putin last June mysteriously fizzled and ended. He would go to Belarus. He would focus on Africa. All was well that ended well.

But Putin would get him. 

And based on what's known now, he did. Check out this tweet:

If TASS, the Russian state news agency is saying that, you can be pretty sure that that's exactly what happened.

This observation sums it up:

There's also this:

He obviously doesn't care that everyone knows he did it, and he probably wanted people to see exactly how he did it.

 

The Ukrainian press is reporting that there are rumors of a second coup.

 

Which if true, would explain a heckuva lot of what is going on. Kill or be killed.

The bottom line here, no matter what may be happening, is Putin plays for keeps.

He doesn't play the same kinds of games as Democrats, in other words, who say one thing is happening, such as "justice" or "democracy," when in reality something else is happening.

Whether he is a cornered rat or a wily serpent taking his time to exact his revenge to send a message to the others, he's not playing the same game as Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.

While Biden is pressuring Congress to cough up another $24 billion for Ukraine, the New York Times is reporting that the Ukrainian military we are sending it to is not even putting up a proper fight. The New York Times today ran this headline:

Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say 

Their forces are split and scattered around when they should be concentrating on the objective of blowing out the bridge from Russia to Crimea.

That's unfocused stuff, and there may be a lot of reasons for this, one of which is that casualty-laden Ukraine may be getting weary of this fight, But it may be many things. The surest thing is that it's a world apart from the icy focus seen in Putin. The Bidenites seem satisfied solely for spending money, with no care given for results.

Putin, who just brazenly blew a potential rival who defied him out of the sky, thinks differently.

Image: Twitter screen shot

UPDATE: A reader conversant in Russian has added clarity to the report from TASS, saying that the tweet about the TASS article goes a bit too far. The original TASS announcement says only that the plane crashed.

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