Escobar: What Happens In Russia After 'The Longest Day'?
_Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,_ (https://thecradle.co/article-view/26461/what-happens-in-russia-after-the-longest-day)
_**Following Wagner’s ‘rebellion’ – which was nothing more than a blatant coup attempt, and a PR stunt demonstrated by Prighozin’s top-notch theatrics – NATO and the Collective West’s excitement over the possibility of Russia descending into chaos and civil war were quickly turned into utter disappointment.**_
( 
)The first draft (https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/06/26/when-the-lightning-of-history-strikes-better-cut-to-the-chase-in-our-first-draft/) of the extraordinary events that took place in Russia on The Longest Day – Saturday, June 24 – leads us to a whole new can of worms.
**The Global Majority badly wants to know what happens next. Let’s examine the key pieces in the chessboard.**
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is cutting to the chase: he has reminded everyone that the Hegemon’s modus operandi is to back coup attempts whenever it can benefit. This dovetails with the fact that the FSB is actively investigating whether and how Western intel was involved in The Longest Day.
President Putin could not have been more unequivocal:
> “They \[the West and Ukraine\] wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that soldiers and civilians would die, so that in the end Russia would lose, and our society would break apart and choke on bloody civil strife (…) They rubbed their hands, dreaming of getting revenge for their failures at the front and during the so-called counter-offensive, but they miscalculated.”
**Cue to the collective West – from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on down – frantically trying to distance itself even as the CIA leaked, via its trademark mouthpiece, the _Washington Post_, that they knew about “the rebellion.”**
The agenda was painfully obvious: Kiev losing on all fronts would be ritually buried by wall-to-wall coverage of the fake Russian “civil war.”
**There’s no smoking gun – yet. But the FSB is following several leads to demonstrate how the “the rebellion” was set up by CIA/NATO.** The spectacular failure makes the upcoming NATO July 11 summit in Vilnius even more incandescent.
The Chinese, much like Lavrov, also cut to the chase: the Global Times asserted that the idea of “Wagner’s revolt weakening Putin’s authority is wishful thinking of the West,” with the Kremlin’s “strong capacity of deterrence” further increasing its authority. That’s exactly the reading of the Russian street.
The Chinese reached their conclusion after a crucial visit by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Rudenko, who promptly flew to Beijing on Sunday, June 25. This is how the iron-clad strategic partnership works in practice.
**“The rebellion” as a P.R. stunt**
Arguably the best explanation so far of the nuts and bolts of The Longest Day has been offered (https://globalsouth.co/2023/06/26/the-prigogine-mutiny-intermediate-finish/)by Rostislav Ischenko.
**The Global Majority will rejoice that Prighozin’s theatrics, in the end, left the collective West dazed, confused, and shattered: wasn’t the whole thing supposed to unleash total chaos inside Russian society and the army?**
Even as the fake, lightning-quick “mutiny” was in progress, Russia continued to pound Kiev’s forces – which, by the way, were spinning that the main phase of the “counter-offensive” was being launched exactly on June 24 at night. That was, predictably, yet another bluff.
Back to the Russian street. “The rebellion” – inbuilt in a very convoluted plot – in the end was widely interpreted as just another military demonstration (by master of ceremonies Prighozin, not by the overwhelming majority of Wagner soldiers). **“The rebellion” turned out to be a Western P.R. stunt, a series of (ultimately faded) pictures for global consumption.**
But now things are bound to get way more serious.
**Lavrov, once again, pointed to the role being played by the ever-self-aggrandized Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron, right up there with the United States: “Macron clearly saw in the developments an opportunity to realize the threat of Ukraine dealing Russia a strategic blow, a mantra NATO leaders have been holding onto.”**
So just like Kiev and the collective Western media, Lavrov added, Macron remains part of a single “machine” working against Moscow. That ties up with Putin, who stated of Macron’s Sunday intervention that “the entire Western military, economic and information machine has been set in motion against us.”
And that’s a fact.
**Betting on …
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-what-happens-russia-after-longest-day