"This is the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin. That may seem an odd thing to say when he is in command of nearly five million armed men in various police, military and paramilitary units. A mutiny by 25,000 mercenaries a thousand miles away might appear, at first glance, to be a minor irritant.
But that is not how autocracies work. Putin’s power rests on projection, on propaganda, on the image of invincibility. Now, all of a sudden, the curtain is being snatched back, revealing the Wizard of Oz as a small, mediocre, frightened man."
"One man who understands these subtleties is Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, a minor Leningrad gangster who rose with Putin and was rewarded with a big catering contract before he launched the Wagner Group.
Wagner’s brutal mercenaries are active in some of the most benighted places on earth. Among other things, they guard gold mines in Sudan and energy deposits in Libya. Their soldiers are often the refuse of Russian jails, but their officers tend to be former regulars, in many cases men who have been cashiered for insubordination, pilfering or violence. Hence their constant need to disparage the army, to portray themselves as the real professionals.
We’ll come in a moment to Prigozhin’s motives. For now, note the single most extraordinary fact of the past 24 hours, namely that Wagner, which could not complete the capture of Bakhmut in six months, was able to take the Russian city of Rostov in six hours.
Hitler said of the Soviet Union that, once you kicked in the door, the whole rotten structure would come tumbling down. Certainly the refusal of some Russian regulars to engage the Wagner mutineers suggests either a collapse of morale on their part or a measure of prearrangement."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-verge-total-disintegration-local-130513932.html