Luka was almost certainly acting on behalf of the Kremlin because for image purposes the Kremlin could not be seen to be the ones making the offer of leniency to traitors, they needed to be the bad cop to Lukashenko’s good cop. In the interest of avoiding a dangerous escalation Luka was used as an ostensible (but not really) “third party” to give the leaders of the mutiny who had backed themselves into a corner a way to still get out of this with their lives so that they wouldn’t fight to the death and take valuable rank and file soldiers with them.
We don’t know what the terms were exactly, we’ll have to wait and see, but from what has been openly stated at least there is no indication that any of the demands of the mutineers were conceded to, personnel changes were not even discussed (imo there was never a snowball’s chance in hell of the government agreeing to that, can you imagine how bad it would be for discipline to allow some uppity mercs to dictate who the commanders of the armed forces are? it would be an enormous violation of the chain of command!), and the integration of Wagner into the official armed forces has only accelerated.
On the whole i think this was unavoidable at some point because the contradiction of giving so much power and prominence to a mercenary group was always going to create conflict, but the way it was handled was just about the optimal way to do it and Russia will come out of this stronger. There will be some who will say that Russia should have foreseen this and not allowed it to come this far in the first place, and maybe that is true, but maybe it was also good it happened the way it did because it offers an opportunity for a more thorough cleanse and a more decisive break with previous policy toward PMCs.
More consolidation under the official state power structures is a good thing for when communists take over again. Mercenaries with too much influence and autonomy would be a nasty problem to deal with. And at the very least the image of Wagner and especially that of certain personalities involved with it is irreversibly tarnished in the eyes of the Russian public, and again i can’t say that that is bad, they were getting too full of themselves and starting to have a negative morale impact by denigrating the performance of the regular armed forces without whom they could never have even operated the way they did to begin with.
Luka was almost certainly acting on behalf of the Kremlin because for image purposes the Kremlin could not be seen to be the ones making the offer of leniency to traitors, they needed to be the bad cop to Lukashenko’s good cop. In the interest of avoiding a dangerous escalation Luka was used as an ostensible (but not really) “third party” to give the leaders of the mutiny who had backed themselves into a corner a way to still get out of this with their lives so that they wouldn’t fight to the death and take valuable rank and file soldiers with them.
We don’t know what the terms were exactly, we’ll have to wait and see, but from what has been openly stated at least there is no indication that any of the demands of the mutineers were conceded to, personnel changes were not even discussed (imo there was never a snowball’s chance in hell of the government agreeing to that, can you imagine how bad it would be for discipline to allow some uppity mercs to dictate who the commanders of the armed forces are? it would be an enormous violation of the chain of command!), and the integration of Wagner into the official armed forces has only accelerated.
On the whole i think this was unavoidable at some point because the contradiction of giving so much power and prominence to a mercenary group was always going to create conflict, but the way it was handled was just about the optimal way to do it and Russia will come out of this stronger. There will be some who will say that Russia should have foreseen this and not allowed it to come this far in the first place, and maybe that is true, but maybe it was also good it happened the way it did because it offers an opportunity for a more thorough cleanse and a more decisive break with previous policy toward PMCs.
More consolidation under the official state power structures is a good thing for when communists take over again. Mercenaries with too much influence and autonomy would be a nasty problem to deal with. And at the very least the image of Wagner and especially that of certain personalities involved with it is irreversibly tarnished in the eyes of the Russian public, and again i can’t say that that is bad, they were getting too full of themselves and starting to have a negative morale impact by denigrating the performance of the regular armed forces without whom they could never have even operated the way they did to begin with.
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