Substacks

WHY PUTIN KILLED PRIGOZHIN Seymour Hersh

Published

1 year ago

September 7, 2023

A view of the site after a private jet carrying Wagner paramilitary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino on August 23. / Photo by Investigative Committee of Russia/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

Over the past two late summer weeks we’ve looked back at past American military disasters, so time now to bring you up to date on the continuing madness in Ukraine.

Let’s start with the fallout from the death last month of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. The mercenary made a fortune renting out his forces as guns for hire, largely in Central Africa, and the group took enormous losses in brutal and successful house-to-house combat earlier this year in the city of Bakhmut against an equally courageous Ukraine army. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in late June that the Kremlin had paid Prigozhin’s army, many recruited from the country’s prisons, nearly $1 billion dollars between May of 2022 and May of 2023. I have reported in previous columns that the rebellion Prigozhin launched in June was far from the threat to Putin’s standing that the Western media consistently reported it to be. It was instead a historically Russian way of sidelining an often troublesome mercenary leader.

Prigozhin and his reduced Wagner force were left in limbo after the aborted revolt, and many Wagner members were absorbed into the Russian military. Putin arranged for Prigozhin and what was left of his mercenary force to be driven into exile in Belarus.

But Prigozhin did not stop there. By early August there were reports of border tensions as the remnant of the Wagner Group made a series of intrusions into the airspace of Poland, and troublesome threats at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. For Putin, triggering complaints from NATO countries was an unforgivable breach. “That was it,” a knowledgeable US intelligence official told me.

Substacks

Is a Foreign Adversary Flying Drones over New Jersey? Madeleine Kearns

Published

5 hours ago

December 12, 2024

For the past four weeks, car-sized objects have been reported flying over critical infrastructure and military assets in New Jersey. They come from the ocean, appearing around sunset, and sometimes turn off their lights. Residents demand answers, but despite scrambling for information, state and local authorities say they remain largely in the dark.

But on Wednesday, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) offered what he said was “the real deal” explanation of the mysterious drones. “Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America,” he told Fox News.

Van Drew’s account, which he said came from “very high, very qualified, very responsible” sources, was startling.

Yet in a matter of hours, the Pentagon dismissed his claims out of hand. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” said Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon spokeswoman. “We’re going to continue to monitor what is happening, but at no point were our installations threatened.”

Substacks

Niall Ferguson: The Vibe Shift Goes Global Niall Ferguson

Published

10 hours ago

December 12, 2024

I am a 60-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders, oolong tea, and the novels of Walter Scott—so no one will ever accuse me of being an arbiter of cool. But to understand politics and even geopolitics you have to understand culture, which is sometimes—often—upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes.

Specifically, vibe shifts.

The pop culture commentator Sean Monahan identified three mini-epochs between 2003 and 2020: Hipster/Indie (ca. 2003–9), Post-Internet/Techno (ca. 2010–16), and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20). Each was defined by a distinct aesthetic, and the vibe shift from one to the other was swift and palpable. As the pandemic receded, New York magazine’s Allison P. Davis predicted that another vibe shift had to be approaching. (And indeed, Monahan has dubbed the new epoch “Pilled/Scene.”)

I confess none of this meant much to me. I couldn’t tell a hypebeast from a hipster if my life depended on it.

But the term finally clicked—and acquired a powerful significance—when it was imported to the world of tech. In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.