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Disparches

1) Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, “Putin has signed his name on the wrong piece of paper this time; Get ready for the flood of kompromat,” The Telegraph, August 24, 2023 (3:27pm);

Analysis

The headline could read: Mastermind war criminal assassinates his lirtenant, also a major war criminal.

Though commentators miss tge point, one of the most unforgivable things Yevgeny Prigozhin did about the time of his mutiny was to issue a powerful fact-based critiques of Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The mutiny was explicitly not directed at Putin himself, and might have been overlooked inview of Prigozhin’s usefulness as the leader of the Wagner Group in Africa. But the fact that he sopke the truth about tge war in Ukraine may have been even more threatening, because it threatened to undue the tissie of lies which Putin and Russian state media have woven to justify the war and its great costs to the population and tbe nation.

That is a rational analysis.

Yet while these factors may have influenced Putin’s thinking, in the end the apparent decision to kill Prigozhin may have been more based on tbe logic of the capo of a very large crime family (the Russian elites) who felt he had to openly exact retribution in order to maintain his grip on leadership of the family.

In any event, we don’t to shed a tear of the assassination of a major Russian war criminal whose crimes in Syria and Ukraine were presumably ordered by the very person many observers see as Prigozhin’s putative assassin.

de Bretton-Gordon’s opinion columns are usually fact-based and closely-reasoned. This makes his opinions in todays column all the more remarkable. His column today merits a close read.

The Trenchant Observer

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