Igor Zaytsev's blog

The most notable of the recent news is the Prigozhin’s remark that Russia has to Finish the Special Military Operation (SMO) soon. Namely to stop any offensive operations, switching instead to the defense. The Government should announce the successful completion of the SMO. Later he self-edited, saying he didn’t mean to suggest the fighting should stop or the war itself should end, but only that the SMO should be announced as successfully completed, and no new offensive actions should be taken from now on.

Applying the cynical approach to analyze this insanity, the most obvious explanation is that the evil clown is running out of “cannon meat” (as he and the Russian government sees it). His most free source of sacrificial lambs was cut off then MoD decided to route the convicts to “Somaly” and other non-strictly MoD formations, instead of the Wagner Group. This was one of the results of power struggle between Prigozhin and Shoigu.

Without free “cannon meat” there is no more pointless but high-cost offensive operations in UA. The rest of the Wagner, the contracted mercenaries, are free to leave if they think their deaths serve no purpose. Those are mostly professionals, not the 6-months slaves like the convicts, who have no choice but to do as they told or be executed with a sledgehammer.

Another point the evil clown has made is that this kind of SMO “resolution” would be preferable to some agreement forged in secret by the Rasputin. On this point he may be actually right. Practically all agreements made by Rasputin were more harmful than if there were no agreements at all.

Of course, from the government’s point of view, announcing “mission accomplished” right now, then Belgorod is shelled and hit on daily basis, would be an extremely unpopular move. No one would buy this “success”, except for the most brain-dead and hard-core stooges of the regime.

This being said, the domestic opposition to Rasputin’s regime is starting to take a shape. Namely, the so-called “the Club of Infuriated Patriots” (I would call it CIP for short) is an ideological opposition that started to grow from the ground up, which is quite rare for Russian society. Strelkov has joined the “Club”, finding a like-minded people there united under the main idea of “Rasputin’s corrupted and incompetent government must go in order for Russia to win this war (against the atlantists, not merely the banderites)”.

Probably in order to combat this new anti-Putin popular movement, Rasputin himself came down to earth in an extremely rare show of concern for mundane, visiting the head-quarters of Lugansk and Kherson forces. He talked to generals and drove around a bit. Then he finally left back to Kremlin — the only place he feels truly at home.

In other news, the chief officer of the Russian MoD mobilization department was convicted in the crime of demanding a bribe in the form of a Bosh washing machine from some local mobilization office in order to give that office commander a good review. The court found it appropriate to find him 400,000 rubles (~$5,000) and a ban to serve in public office for the next two years. In another place, a new-generation diesel-electric submarine, the leader of the Lada class, the “Sankt-Peterburg” of the project 677, which was built from 2005 and entered service with the Russian Navy in 2021, is now destined for utilization. The explanation is that “it will be more expensive to upgrade it, than to build a new one”, according to Kommersant paper’s source in the industry. These two news demonstrate perfectly the level of corruption and incompetency that grew under Rasputin’s rule. Left alone this cancer would devastate Russia without any war or foreign influence.