Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future. Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent. In the riverside presidential palace in Bangui, the capital, Prigozhin told President Faustin-Archange Touadera that his aborted June mutiny in…

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Leila Al Shami writes: Yesterday, 25 August, the revolution flag flew high in villages, towns and cities across Syria. In Sweida, Dera’a, Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa, Hasakeh and Deir Al Zour, thousands were on the streets reviving the chants of the revolution. Protests erupted in the south of the country a few days ago, in regime-held Sweida and Dera’a. They were triggered by the cost-of-living crisis, especially the recent increase in fuel prices as subsidies were cut. People are struggling to…

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Mohammed Ali Kalfood writes: In mid-June, dozens of political and tribal figures from Yemen’s largest governorate, Hadhramaut, announced the establishment of a new political entity known as the Hadhramaut National Council, which they said “aims to serve as a political platform to express the aspirations and represent the interests of the Hadhrami community in Yemen.” Hadhramaut, which holds some 80 percent of Yemen’s oil reserves, shares a long border with Saudi Arabia—which partly explains why the formation of the council…

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Reuters reports: The United States is looking at a number of theories over what brought down the plane presumed to be carrying mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, including a surface-to-air missile hitting it, U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday. Russian air authorities have said Prigozhin, his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin and eight other people were on the private plane that crashed with no survivors north of Moscow on Wednesday. Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that it…

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Anne Applebaum writes: Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the…

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Brian Klaas writes: Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead. Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate…

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Fred Kaplan writes: Did President Joe Biden miss an opportunity to end the war in Ukraine diplomatically nine months ago? Some commentators and at least one U.S. official are starting to think he might have. I disagree. The queasy feeling was first articulated last week in a Politico article that recalled a speech last November by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The war was getting brutal, both sides had suffered horrible casualties, civilians were under…

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The New York Times reports: Ukraine’s grinding counteroffensive is struggling to break through entrenched Russian defenses in large part because it has too many troops, including some of its best combat units, in the wrong places, American and other Western officials say. The main goal of the counteroffensive is to cut off Russian supply lines in southern Ukraine by severing the so-called land bridge between Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula. But instead of focusing on that, Ukrainian commanders have…

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The Washington Post reports: The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol, people familiar with the classified forecast told The Washington Post, a finding that, should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push. The grim assessment is based on Russia’s brutal proficiency in defending occupied territory through a phalanx of minefields and trenches, and is…

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Michael Karadjis writes: On July 19, South Africa announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be attending the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in late August, ending speculation about whether South Africa would arrest him because of the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend instead. The ICC warrant accuses Putin of illegally deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia. Russia, like the United States, is not a signatory to the ICC, whereas…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia’s currency fell to its weakest level in over a year and the central bank called an emergency meeting, signs of intensifying financial pressure on an economy weighed down by Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine. The ruble’s decline picked up pace in recent weeks, and on Monday the currency fell past 100 to the U.S. dollar for the first time since the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. So far this year, the ruble has lost almost 30% of…

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Alexander J. Motyl writes: It’s time to start taking the potential disintegration of Russia seriously. A number of analysts see the shattering of the Russian Federation as a possible aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic war in Ukraine. Although the world would be better off with a much weakened Russia, its fall may not go smoothly. The Jamestown Foundation’s Janusz Bugajski would probably agree with this assessment: “as a rump state, under intense international sanctions and shorn of its resource base…

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Edward Luce interviewed Christo Grozev in Aspen in July: How does it feel, I ask, to be here in absentia? Grozev laughs. After the Russians indicted him “in absentia”, he posted a selfie video from Palm Beach, Florida, against a sunset backdrop. “I said, ‘If this is absentia, it’s a pretty great place to be.’” Is Austria the least safe European country? “Yes,” he replies. “While we [Bellingcat] were investigating the Austrians, they were surveilling me and I wasn’t aware…

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