A terrible week for Russian aviation (and other things)
Another case of “sudden Russia death syndrome”
Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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We had a post about spies queued up for this week, but as so often happens these days, current events overtook the best laid plans of two ex-Navy guys.
Today’s post is about Mr. Putin’s remarkable week—is “remarkable” the right word?
Last weekend, Russia attempted to land their Luna-25 probe on the moon…and crashed.1 One might imagine Mr. Putin was hoping a successful lunar landing would give him some positive press for the rest of his very busy week.
On Tuesday, Mr. Putin took part in the BRICS conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was a wee bit awkward for the Russian President. He had to attend the conference remotely because of an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for his abduction of children in Ukraine.2
[Educational side bar: BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which formed a bloc of emerging economies in 2009. They represent 40% of the global population and 30% of global economic output.]
Then came Thursday and Russia was back in the news. A private jet, carrying ten people, including private military contractor Wagner Group CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin, suffered “at least one catastrophic midair event”.3 If you haven’t yet seen the video of the plane crash, it’s worth watching. The aircraft just falls out of the sky.
If the name Prigozhin rings a bell, it’s because we talked about him a few weeks ago in our post, “The Russian Coup That Wasn’t.”
We found it remarkable that the leader of a private military contractor could stage a mutiny inside Russia and get away with it. As we wrote at the time:
Then it got weird. Mr. Putin, the consummate strong man autocrat, cut a deal with the leader of the coup to stay in power for another day. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the president of Belarus intervened and offered safe harbor to the Wagner Group…So for now, things are back to normal—at least, that’s what Mr. Putin wants us to believe. We are not buying that for a hot minute. This “coup” story is far from over.
Several of our readers sent us notes about the remarkable similarity between the air accident in Order of Battle and the events of Thursday. We would like to assure you that any similarities between our fiction and the stranger-than-fiction current events are entirely coincidental.
We do have two comments about the Prigozhin air mishap.
First, it is amazing how everyone is being so careful to point out that although Progozhin was listed on the flight manifest, his death is not confirmed. It seems that everyone expects another shoe to drop in this story. Like some horror movie, the crazed murderer is not really dead. He’s going to rise up, like Hannibal Lecter, and come after us one last time.
Probably not. As veteran Putin watcher Dr. Fiona Hill noted in an NPR interview yesterday when asked about the in-your-face nature of the Prigozhin assassination:
It's, you know, deliberately showy. It's demonstrative…Many people have referred repeatedly to sudden Russian death syndrome and all of these gruesome ways in which people meet their end at the hands of the state. And people related to it. It's meant to be like that, to get attention - everyone's attention at home and abroad - so that we're just all fully cognizant of what Russia is capable of…
[Longtime readers might remember that JR interviewed Dr. Hill on his radio show in late 2021. Their discussion about Putin, Ukraine and the future of the Russian Federation is worth s (re)listen.]
Our last point is deadly serious. The Prigozhin saga reinforces what we already knew: Mr. Putin is a known quantity. He will do anything, kill anyone, take any risk to stay in power.
He will not change. And we need to deal with that.
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On his radio show, National Security This Week, JR talks with James Borton, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) about environmental security in the South China Sea.
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David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russias-lunar-mission-failure-raises-questions-about-state-of-space-program