Access the Twitter threads here:
2) Vladimir Osechkin's rebuttal to Wind of Change
3) August 14th FSB letter response to the rebuttal
Please listen to this first to understand the background & context of the FSB letters:
Just prior to the #WagnerPMC command center in occupied Ukraine got hit with #HIMARS, #WindofChange sent the following FSB letter. Then Osechkin published his response, and Wind of Change sent a follow up response. (Pictured: Prigozhin at the C2 that was subsequently destroyed)'
Translation of the correspondence including August 13th #FSBletters from the Wind of Change inside the FSB to
@Vlad_Osechkin, Osechkin's public response, and the follow up from Wind of Change. Subject: Prigozhin (Putin’s mafioso in charge of Wagner PMC)
As always, my comments for clarification are in (parenthesis). Wind of Change's parenthesis are in [brackets]. To Osechkin: “Some information on Prigozhin. In principle, even before his problems with the 'Telegrammers,' (Telegram is a widely used social media platform in Russia)
I wrote that he was greatly displeased. But to understand how "strongly" and who is involved would require providing a lot more information. Prigozhin had a complete carte blanche to form a branch of military "alternatives" since the days of Syria.
In this case, such an approach was not only a business for him, but also a certain type of romance: the leaks about the Wagner PMC largely came from him, he was very unhappy with the fact that this force was not officially recognized.
(Private military groups such as Wagner are illegal under Russian law, so they were kept out of the public view in the past.) Syria was its own story: in exchange for funding the PMCs, Prigozhin received control over a number of natural resource facilities in that country.
They quarreled with the Defense Ministry over it, after which the military ceased to support Wagner as much. As is usual, the dispute was a financial one - no one was willing to share the large sums of money (stolen from Syria).
Concurrently, Prigozhin was developing a media division, popularly known as the "troll factory." He also has his own security service, the level of which should not be underestimated. Probably one of the best corporate integrated security services in all of Russia.
Now the "Ukrainian crisis" is confronted with a shortage of manpower. There will be no general mobilization for the time being [I indicated the reasons before - nothing has changed], hidden mobilization is going on at full speed, and the Prigozhin plan with mass recruitment of prisoners was initially [in March] rejected. At that time the Service (FSB) definitely rejected that, but it was not just us. (see previous FSB letter on that)
Now to the problems that prevent the start of large-scale mobilization in Russia.
— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) April 12, 2022
1. Mobilization in the form of agitation to sign the contract is going on, but the result is absolutely useless.
But the disastrous June-July situation with manpower at the front gave Prigozhin a chance. It should be explicitly said that he pulled this piece of work in terms of quantitative recruitment, purely technically a working solution was found by him. (Mass prisoner recruitment)
And now Prigozhin feels like a "new tsar," and he has clearly overestimated his own influence. Objectively, what he is doing is out of line.
He is not just building some kind of "Organized Criminal Enterprise within the Law" on a national scale - he is forging his own military-political state at a rapid pace, without being a state, inside an existing state, which completely ignores all the other participants.
Prigozhin is given a major ultimatum: he must forget about his attempts at politics. We are not talking about (his) puppets in the Duma (Russian parliament), but about his influence on processes and personnel appointments. If he complies, the system will quietly back down.
But that’s a lie (that the system will just back off if Prigozhin reverses course on his ambitions) – as the line has already been crossed, the situation won’t return to “as was before.”
Now the task is to eliminate Prigozhin as a factor of influence [not physically, although if there is an opportunity - why not?], but to avoid the costs of active confrontation.
And given the level of Prigozhin's security personnel [there are many of our former (FSB) guys], he is unlikely to be in a state of blissful ignorance (about the dilemma he finds himself in).
All his opponents in this conflict [Prigozhin has so many influential enemies that he should expect a strike from all of them] have one task: to prepare a justification for future conflicts in the spirit of "he started it" and "and it's not me, it's someone from the crowd.”
Add to this the picture of the cruelest confrontation between conditional hawks and conditional doves [for the thousandth time, I repeat that there is no "party of peace" among these "doves"] against the background of a catastrophic scenario, then add to this cocktail a new rule - "no more old rules" - and you can understand the prospects of the situation as a whole.
Prigozhin has a very strong trump card - if you remove his Wagnerians, then the whole military machine will break down.There is always a conditional division into "hawks" and "doves," but our leadership (both in the FSB and in the country as a whole) does not like to take a side when the winner is not very clear.
— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) April 2, 2022
The Wagnerians are the highest paid and very professional [they are the ones who go through serious selection process], but they don't have any regard for casualties.
They are used to pull off the hardest [and even hopeless] tasks and sections of the front, and they have everything (in terms of equipment) the army has in this war.
The (recruited) criminals there are used extremely cruelly and, in some ways, wastefully, but effectively in terms of controlling them. The army would not be able to achieve anything to close.
For this reason alone, there is no force in Russia that can justify the need to cardinally solve the Prigozhin problem Now comes the stage of blocking his political opportunities and creating a springboard to prepare for a large-scale final blow (against Prigozhin).
Prigozhin's weakness – he really has lost touch with reality and has made some powerful enemies.
At the same time, a number of parties in conflict with each other are not ready for direct alliances with Prigozhin, because to use him for their own interests, given his power and ambitions, is to risk becoming a bargaining chip for Prigozhin himself.
All the analysis that will now go into this topic is nothing more than the preparation of staging grounds by the various parties.
Truth is not worth waiting for, because it won’t come from the likes of Beglov (Prigozhin’s public enemy & governor of St. Petersburg), the military, or us (FSB): all will try to use the current moment in their favor.
Prigozhin provoked the situation in such a way that it can only end in his decisive victory or total defeat. Given the magnitude of his ambitions, it will not happen quietly nor quickly.
In addition, the capabilities of his own security service are such that neither an accident on the stairs, nor tea poisoning, nor an accidental landmine from a Ukrainian DRG (Military Sabotage/Recon Group) will happen in the foreseeable future.” (END of August 13th #FSBletters)
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Translation of @Vlad_Sechkin’s published rebuttal to the August 13th #FSBletters from the #WindofChange. “http://Gulagu.net’s position diverges from the author of the letter. We understand the FSB wants to distance itself from Wagner PMC, considering:
1) It is impossible to organize any PMCs in Russia without the approval of the FSB;
2) Ex-agent of the FSB has already testified that under the guise of PMCs, members of FSB Spetsnatz "Vympel" unit (also known as Directorate “V” of the FSB Special Purpose Center) traveled to a number of countries to carry out special operations and sabotage in the so-called "external environment." Prigozhin and a number of FSB generals are connected by more than just friendship and common achievements; (Money)
3) It was Department "M" of the FSB that gave recruiters of the PMCs (including Wagner) access (to recruit prisoners) in the Federal Penitentiary Service institutions under their control [the question "why" is still open];
4) In one of the departments of the 4th Service of the FSB, materials for a number of promising criminal cases against both Yevgeny and Polina Prigozhin, which included the participation of Prigozhin's son-in-law Shura Sklyarov, who unexpectedly provided "active participation" against the background of the property division during the dissolution of the marriage in the collection of materials.
But the (FSB) management ordered to hide the evidence for the ready-made criminal cases under Articles 210, 159, 160, 174.1, 291UK under the guise of DOU (operational record files) without registration in the KYCP (book of accounting for reports of incidents at Ministry of Internal Affairs) for implementation of cases of fraud of more than 1 billion rubles. This also points to the #FSB's close cooperation with #Prigozhin.
So, the FSB will not be able to distance themselves from Prigozhin.” (END of translation of Vladimir Osechkin's rebuttal to the #WindofChange's August 13th #FSBletters)
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Translation of the August 14th #FSBletters from the #WindofChange in response to Vladimir Osechkin’s rebuttal to the previous FSB letter on #Prigozhin.
“There have always been internal conflicts in the Service, as in any large structure. But now the ‘unity’ of the entire structure rests solely on the factors of external [in relation to the Service, not the country] threats.
There is reason to believe that the internal divisions will rise to a level that will turn into a real war within the structure, with consequences that no one can predict, at least in general terms.
The FSB as a monolithic unified and autonomous structure does not exist now, the probability of completely mutually exclusive actions with a direct conflict of objectives in different branches is enormous.
The quality of management is deteriorating, and the search for culprits among our own people is active. The number of new mistakes is growing, while the old ones have not yet been dealt with.
Therefore, the Service's actions regarding individuals such as Prigozhin should also be viewed through the prism of the bureaucratic survival of the structure itself.
Ideally, the entire FSB should be disbanded and reassembled completely, but this is impossible for a multitude of independent reasons. In addition, the situation is no better in either the military or the industrial bloc. It is high time to look to our neighbors for blame.
I am not absolving the FSB from blame for the PMCs nor for the multitude of other actions. I am just trying to show the logic of the moment.
And so, I think, very soon the FSB will become a generator of very interesting news about its own structural subdivisions. Let everyone be held accountable for their actions. Regards, All the best."
(END of translation of the August 14th #FSBletters from #WindofChange)