Please confine all news pertaining to Russia-Ukraine war to this thread exclusively. Any links shared outside of this thread will be subject to removal.
If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t return to Russia after the war. I wouldn’t even eat or drink anything in which might have even the slightest chance of having radioactive material.
He’s moving to Belarus, which may as well be the same thing.
so, bananas?
Does anyone else think that being seen as weak and capitulating to Prigozhin here is basically a death sentence to Putin?
Doing that has to have just put SO MUCH blood in the water for every internal agency/power-block with aspirations of taking him down and replacing him.
Apparently all you need is 20,000 men and Putin’s defenceless…
My opinion is that this is going to cause chaos.
The fact that Putin didn’t have Wagner immediately atomized on the spot suggests that he wasn’t powerful enough to do so. Not a statement that someone in Putin’s position would want to make, I would think.
Of course we both are speculating without any proof, I am also merely speaking of my gut feeling.
I have been thinking that the rhetoric of saying Putin is weak because Prigozhin was able to momentarily rebel is kind of wishful thinking. I think weak is a pretty strong word.
If Putin is as weak as some of us think he is, Prigozhin would have continued to march towards Moscow already.
At the same time, if Putin is as strong as some of us think he is, his army would have reached Kyiv with a new regime installed already.
Hence the truth should be lying somewhere in between, for now.
I know it’s not something many people want to hear because it isn’t a polarized statement, for example, it’s not as exciting as saying Putin is super strong and can nuke everything, we better bow down to him or Ukraine is super strong and can occupy Moscow tomorrow, let’s give them F-35s.
The reality is war is a boring and extremely slow meat grinder. Sometimes you cannot stop it once it’s started (because deaths can be remembered for a long time) and sometimes you cannot avoid it (forever appeasement is not far from escalating the situation and empowering the bully which is worse off). I can only wish that Ukraine winning the war can prevent the potential China-Taiwan war from happening.
When new weapons arrive on site, I expect things to change. I wish Ukraine get Crimea back.
Clearly, if Prigozhin marched, it’s because he thought it as having a valid chance of success. He left because he was paid what he wanted, be it money or power, etc. Putin, notably capitulated
He did not carpet bomb the fuck, so to speak, out of the traitors. Those threatening his reign. It tells much for those who wish to hear.
Yes! Putin is not some superduper strongman that controls his country as his public persona pretends. He is the guy that the key leaders of Russia allow to be in charge. The moment he is unable to meet their needs is the moment he is replaced. Those key leaders just saw that Putin came this close 🤏 to losing their power to an unpredictable madman, and Putin let the guy off because that was his only option!
Putin’s days are numbered. He not only left Moscow vulnerable to attack, he gave someone the power to demonstrate it on the world stage. Before Feb 2022, Russia was internationally feared as the world’s second strongest military, and now, the joke is that it’s the second strongest military in Russia. That someone even outed that the whole premise of the invasion of Ukraine was false, that the military is terribly messing it up, and that Russia itself is vulnerable to attack. Those key leaders want to maintain their power, and Putin is not the man to do it anymore.
I think there is nothing Putin can do short of a complete Stalin-like Great Purge to stay alive, and I think that purge is impossible with its international relations as he has made enemies with everyone in the West. Putin is rightfully scared. Prigozhin, whether purposefully or in a oblivious narcissistic rage fit, just sealed the fate of Russia. This will undoubtedly encourage other leaders to take a swing at Putin, which makes him a liability to the key leaders’ power. Either Russia has to embrace a democratic revolution where power is stripped from the oligarchs (very unlikely considering opposition disorganization and the country’s economic contributions to the world stage) or a new more authoritarian leader will step in place to reign in control again. Those are the options, so I forsee life in Russia for the general population getting much worse quickly.
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I strongly suspect world leaders would agree that Russia using nukes would be justified according to their nuclear plan. An internal civil war is really the best bet for regime change.
A lot of people are saying that this weakened Putin, put the seed of rebellion in the minds of people, etc. But i disagree. The problem with Russia is that it isnt authoritarian enough. You might think that it is funny that i say this but it is true. The most unstable governments are the ones who havent gone full authoritarian or full democratic. It’s the middle area that is dangerous. With this war, Russia was becoming more and more authoritarian. And now after the coup, the deal will be sealed.
Putin will unify the military and use this coup as an excuse to clamp things down even more. Noone would even be allowed to have any kind of personal military, noone would be allowed to say anything against the government. This was already the case before but now it will be even more. Prigozhin was talking shit for over a year, Putin realizes that it was a mistake to let that happen.
As long as things in Ukraine remain somewhat static(or better for Russia), Putin is safe. If Russia losses Zaporizhia, Putin will be in danger.
PS The failed coup against Erdogan also empowered him and allowed him to consolidate power and purge the opposition.
The most unstable governments are the ones who havent gone full authoritarian or full democratic. It’s the middle area that is dangerous.
This video cites a civil war scholar that makes the same argument. Civil war is most likely in countries that are in the middle of democracy and autocracy, also known as an anocracy. The video even mentions Russia at the 10 min mark.
Putin controls oligarchs through his wealth. Prigozhin can’t do that, and both of the two know it. We’ll see who’s really fucked up now. Prigozhin or Luca.
Honestly, I think a lot revolves around whether or not Prigohzin is still alive a week from now.
Absolutely. Putin has just lost what was left of his authority.
Pending a purge.
The people he would purge just got told that a purge is coming. The entire world knows that the purge is coming. It’s only way to survive. So, those that would be purged are going to replace him with someone that won’t purge them. Things are going to be wild in the next month or two.
I strongly disagree with the decision to centralize all ukraine war news in a megathread.
That’s not how information is consumed on a medium like Lemmy. What you’re doing makes the topic invisible for the vast majority of users.
I think it should be a daily thread, not a single megathread.
is there enough activity for that?
Maybe weekly then until it picks up.
I just realized that this is an active thread, I thought the feed hadn’t updated since June 25th, as many other community feeds are intermittent or have multi day lags. Maybe have a daily thread or something to indicate aliveness?
I totally agree with you. This is a very inefficient way to share information, blending comments with postings.
The solution is to have the option to filter dominant topics the same way /r/worldnews does. We should do this in addition to having a megathread, again just like /r/worldnews.
Too many things happening to make a new post for every single event.
Dude this is over two weeks old already. The date in the title makes it look like it was a daily thread for that one day. You’re effectively hiding news from a large fraction of subscribers with this policy.
Yeah the megathread being so old is an issue. I meant a megathread being daily would make sense.
Ah, I just realised, I mistook you for someone else. I guess because of the vowel, I thought you’re @Ruud who runs this lemmy instance.
That’s why I wrote as if you’re the one making the decision - sorry.
Russian military death toll in Ukraine rises to 224,630:
garbage source
Traffic restrictions on Russia’s M-4 Don highway remain in force in Moscow, Tula regions:
U.S. spies learned in mid-June Prigozhin was planning armed action in Russia:
New aid package to Ukraine from Australia announced
*"70 additional vehicles will include 28 armoured trucks, and 28 M113 armoured vehicles, taking the total gifted to 56. It also includes 14 special operations vehicles. It will also fund additions to artillery ammunition, and $10m to the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.
“This is about helping the Ukrainian people with shelter, health services, clean water and sanitation,” prime minister Albanese says.
This additional support will make a real difference, helping the Ukrainian people who continue to show great courage in the face of Russia’s illegal, unprovoked and immoral war. It is sobering that 16 months on from Russia’s invasion, its brutal conflict continues."*
Hi all … kind of a meta non-news question.
I’ve been thinking about getting a person who writes great Russia-Ukraine threads over on Mastodon to post their threads here. I’ve got a general post about the possibility here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1528973.
I’ve also pestered @[email protected] via DM.
Just wondering what your thoughts are on whether there’d be a good fit here.
The main point is to make it as easy as possible for them by allowing them to post from mastodon still. So the ideal would be that they would create new posts here and create a thread within that post, to which people would be free to comment on of course.
Except that doesn’t seem to fit within the rules here, especially rule
[1.1] Submissions must be links to news articles..Thing is, this person’s threads are full of citations of or links to Telegram sources from within Russia or the region, basically a thread of primary sources that the author is compiling into a digestible narrative. It might really be something people here would appreciate, especially as I discovered them through links provided in a megathread on here.
Sooo … I’m wondering what you think and whether there might be some scope to alter the rules and allow for this sort of thing … the idea would be that it’s something like a journalist live reporting.
Hi,
While Rule [1.1] applies to the main submission post, we would like to clarify that in the case of our mega thread, posting links to social media sources (such as Mastodon) is acceptable as they will be placed in the comments section of the thread.
As of now, we don’t have much experience with cross-posting from Mastodon to Lemmy. However, if you can provide us with some examples, we can explore the possibility of incorporating it in some way. Your input and examples would greatly assist us in understanding the process better and potentially adopting it within our community.
On posting directly to a megathread … thanks! While this is good, and has already happened in megathreads (I forget which I saw it in), it doesn’t lean into the federation of content that can happen which is what I’m trying to see more of. That is, not just “cross-posting” but the same thread existing on two platforms simultaneously in much the same way lemmy communities exist on multiple instances simultaneously.
Otherwise, happy to talk about the mastodon<->lemmy “cross-posting”.
Here’s a basic demo I’ve written, posting from Mastodon to [email protected] : https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095 And here’s the view of the post on lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/post/1142168
You’ll see that both lemmy and mastodon users can comment or reply with the only difference being how the two platforms display the threads (lemmy doing a much nicer job IMO)
The key machansim is that lemmy communities federate to mastodon as “users” that can be “at-ed” like any other user from mastodon. Lemmy then interprets such a post as a new post to the “at-ed” community, takes the first line as the title and the rest as the body. The only trickiness is that lemmy will only pay attention to the first “at-ed” handle, to prevent cross-posting and spam.
What I initially imagined was that someone could start their own journalistic megathreads here by doing exactly the above and then replying to their previous post to create a thread on mastodon and a chain of comments to a “megathread” post here on lemmy. This would be the easiest for the person posting from mastodon.
The difficulty for you is that it would be a post that isn’t necessarily to a news source, but just a stand alone post … though the person I’m asking on behalf of is almost always providing sources/links.
Beyond that there’d be your policy of confining all Russia-Ukraine war stuff to the megathread. On this, they could reply to the megathread and basically embed their mastodon thread within the megathread. This would work well. It’s just that finding the megathread from mastodon and replying to it can be non-trivial and may not be available all the time.
For instance, I can’t find the current megathread on my mastodon account and I don’t know why … it’s probably an instance visibility problem and will get better now that I’ve subscribed/followed [email protected] from my mastodon instance. So this may become a good way forward without much hassle.
As for the kind of threads I’m thinking of … here’s an example: https://hachyderm.io/@mariyadelano/110599817912125441
Also … just to be clear … I’m kind of being a “go-between” here, because I think this sort of thing could be good for the fediverse at large and lemmy too! I’m not the one writing these threads, but I’m talking to the author and suggesting this to them too.
👍 Check DM
I don’t have any DM from you. I’ve seen you another DM as a test. You should now have two from me.
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That makes sense. A counter though, is I got the impression that the telegram sources are trying to hone in on the news coming out of Russia and Ukraine. So propaganda channels, state and independent news sources. How much of that is going on in her threads I’m not sure. My impression though was it is all an attempt to glean what’s really going on by trying to triangulate the various statements, however conflicting, coming from sources closest to events.
Either way, I think the idea is that this sort of thing is an example of journalism, however independent or unaffiliated, being done directly on a fediverse platform. It’s not “official” but it’s arguably interesting and compelling.
From a fediverse perspective, there’s an interesting question of how to stage this sort of work here, where compared to Twitter, the fediverse is struggling to get journalistic activity in here directly.
Mastodon isn’t great, due to a lack of search and algorithms. Lemmy’s communities, threaded comments and up/down votes can maybe make something happen here, especially given how it can federate with lots of microblog users in a way Reddit never could.
See, for example, this perspective: https://plasmatrap.com/notes/9ghighuelyswt9vo
Which basically holds that the live independent journalistic activities that can happen on a social media platform can often precede and eclipse those of mainstream media. This is a big part of what gave Twitter its value and why mainstream media gave it so much attention despite not being the biggest platform.
I don’t know how much it happened on Reddit or how effectively. Obviously megsthreads are an attempt. But the advantage of the fediverse is that the various platforms can pool their resources and distribute information along multiple formats more directly.
New ISW update for the 25th of June
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-25-2023
Wagner boss to leave Russia as reports say US spy agencies picked up signs of planned uprising days ago:
Wonder what the over/under on number of days until Prigozhin accidentally falls out a window are.
Where are the bases the Wagner group are returning to? I hope they are not returning to fight against Ukrainians.
Wagner forces will integrate conventional russian forces. In a few weeks, Wagner will no longer exist. And of course, the soldiers will probably return to occupied Ukraine. Let’s see if they will return to south of Ukraine or Kharkiv.
I believe they are. I saw a couple translations that said “field bases”, which I assume are near the front.
Yessssss. The mega thread returns!! Now I can delete Reddit! ❤️
It’s a pretty dead one but okay.
It’s a pretty dead one but okay.
I just noticed. Thanks Doctor Dick Grabber.
Looks like nafo has moved onto Mastodon guys!
Pro-Ukrainian talk has been hampered on Twitter, so its time to just spread NAFO-like talk to Mastodon. There’s no more benefit to using Twitter for this.
Criminal case against Prigozhin to be dropped — Kremlin:
