Wednesday, November 09, 2022

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Sunday, August 14, 2022

Putin's mafioso & owner of Wagner PMC mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin finds himself in a predicament - August 13th FSB letter, Vladimir Osechkin's rebuttal, and Wind of Change' Aug 14th response.

Access the Twitter threads here: 

1) August 13th FSB letter

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)

 

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.

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)

===========================================

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)

===========================================

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)
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All #FSBletters translated as of August 14th, 2022 - Chronological Order - Look Inside

Before reading these #FSBletters from the #WindofChange, please watch/listen to the following audio for the origin & context of these letters. This will allow you to view & interpret these letters through the right prism. Please feel free to share this page with anyone. (Please subscribe to the YouTube channel - if there is enough interest then I will start posting video content concerning the #FSBletters)




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How corruption has turned into an unstoppable beast threatening to swallow the Russian military whole - August 5th Letter from the Wind of Change inside the FSB

Access the Twitter thread here 

Please listen to this first to understand the background & context of the FSB letters:


 ðŸ§µMy translation of the Aug 5 #FSBletters from #WindofChange inside the FSB to Vladimir Osechkin. Subjects: How corruption has turned into an unstoppable beast threatening to swallow the military whole. Origin of the Russian #PhantomUnits that only exist on paper, and much more.

As always, my comments for clarification are in (parenthesis). Wind of Change's parenthesis are in [brackets]. Let's roll: "Subject: Military Corruption as a Separate Form of Life

Hello, Vladimir! Reports of individual squads of the FSB’s Department of Military Counterintelligence from small streams of various military units turn into a full-flowing river at Lubyanka (FSB HQ).

Each operative compiling the relevant reports and cables is unaware of the scale of the phenomenon. They don't let us consolidate all the information into one document, so I'm sending it to you. This way they will read it faster.

There are things that can be analyzed when they happen, but predicting such twists and turns is practically impossible for any analytical department.

I will share a little on the specifics of corruption in the military, where it is corruption itself that creates fundamentally new problems, processes, and overall management mechanisms.

First of all, the statutory foundation: paragraph 8 of Article 2 of the Federal Law № 76-FZ of May 27, 1998 'On the Status of servicemen':

‘In the event of the absence of servicemen, they retain their status as servicemen until they are declared missing in accordance with the procedure established by law or are declared dead.

The above-mentioned servicemen retain financial and other types of support, which are paid [issued] to spouses or other family members of the servicemen residing together, according to the procedure determined by the Government of the Russian Federation, until full ascertainment of the circumstances of capture or as hostages, internment of servicemen or their release or until their recognition as missing or declared dead is established according to law.’

Now straight to the illustration of how this statue in the federal law was the starting point of a big [and unexpected!!!] change in our military. For example, a serviceman died, the body was left somewhere [if artillery, there may not even be a body].

The payout for his death is established, all is clear with this. But if you "move" the date of his death to a later date on the documents, the family will receive more money through payouts.

From this started small, isolated, and not-so-principled cases of military personnel "holding back" their dead or the dead of their friends so that their families would be credited with more combat payouts.

But here’s where something very different begins. It is disadvantageous for high-ranking commanders to report significant combat losses during operations for which they were responsible.

There are also isolated disastrous situations, for which no one wants to take responsibility at all. This is where it is beneficial for the command to "spread out" the losses over the calendar: not to report half a hundred bodies (dead) in a unit for today, but to distribute the losses at a rate of a couple of people per day, and smoothly stretch them out as additional losses over an extended period of time.

There is still no accurate accounting (of the dead) on the hot sections of the front.

And here the mess starts: sometimes individual units who seemingly have small losses (because the data is falsified and losses are underreported), have to admit their inability to fulfill a combat mission.

[Not only are there many 200s (killed) and 300s (wounded), but now there is a significant amount of 500s (deserters)] The higher-ups, in some cases, are stalling their real loss reports in order to get away with it and keep the problem under the radar.

As a result, we get a closed circuit, where everyone benefits from the manipulation of numbers, but everyone’s self-interest is different. And, a separate point is the sums of money at stake, which are simply enormous.

For combat pay alone, man-per-day is the same $52, not counting salaries and allowances. Just one dead who was "dangled" for a month is already more than $1,500. (Meaning fabricating the date of death by advancing it by just 1 month costs an additional $1,500+)

And 100 people who, according to the documents, died 3 months later (than they really did) - that's almost half a million dollars. Just for the per diem combatants.

For the same reason the number of deserters is greatly underreported: one must be held responsible for a deserter, but if he is "missing" or is a POW, it is a different matter. (This corrupt misclassification also means more money that government owes in combat pay.)

What if he comes to his senses? The issue of (misclassifying the deserter as a ) POW can be "resolved" through a fictitious exchange, or it can be resolved through a "hostage rescue operation.”

The statistics sent up the chain are already distorted, and at every management level more “adjustments” get made, of which both the higher and the lower levels are unaware.
There is no big picture, everywhere is "whatever happens" and "as was negotiated," for now it’s still big know-how for everyone. It’s a startup. (I laughed out loud translating this comparison to a startup company.)

But it is almost impossible to untangle this yarn: No one is interested in exposing the truth, one lie layered on top of another, and the hotter the zone, the more there are such cases. You have to sort it out on the ground, and that is exactly the unsolvable task.

In addition, the military leadership itself plays such games and they are not even interested in the investigation [and there are a bunch of reports on this from various sections of the FSB’s Military Counterintelligence).

Many wives have already mourned their husbands and know that they are dead, but according to the documents "husbands are at war.” The families continue to receive their combat pay, and at some point they'll be paid for their deaths.

Some (of the families) shares a part of the salary (corruptly paid to the dead) with the command of the unit (to keep the scam going), but no one ever voluntarily admits to anything, and there is no time to catch them for now.

Hence another grandiose problem with the military, which they also do not want to admit: If there is a mechanism allowing the concealment of real, large-scale, concrete military failures, then analyzing the failures and their causes is impossible.

But this does not remove the obligation from our management (in the FSB) to provide the analysis, which will “again miss objective confirmation.”

An entire platoon can die in an instant, but so that no one has problems later, according to the paperwork this platoon will "die" over a long period and little by little.
And if the unit suddenly needs to be transferred to this or that task, the phantom unit will "go" according to the documents, although the other unit in the real battle will suddenly find itself without cover.

And if that (real) unit gets annihilated, it can definitely become a "phantom" for a long time.

The loss of a platoon is easier to conceal than the loss of a company, battalion, or regiment, so the smaller the unit lost, the more likely it is to be turned into a "phantom on paper.”

But this is all in the regular army, where everything is not all that bad.
PMCs (Private Military Companies such as Wagner Group) are playing their own games, where the questions of who, how, and with whom are decided within the PMC organization itself.

I have categorically less data on them, but they have much more room to maneuver (with corruption and fabrication). So I can't give you the exact number of dead and wounded from among the prisoners (recruited by the PMCs to fight in #Ukraine) as you requested yet.

Next is the issue of classification of wounds received on the battlefield. Here it is the business built on blood: In certain circumstances, even some chafing can turn into a serious wound.

Military battlefield medicine is a large layer belonging to a massive schema.
And in time of war no one will allow it to be exposed: if you pull on the threads, you can break the whole system, and if you try to pull on a point with precision, then the mutual/circular responsibility (complicity) will immediately react to stop it.

Even in #Donetsk and #Luhansk, medics receive payments from #Moscow, taking into account the severity and duration of treatment of Russian military personnel.

And if it's more profitable for the doctor to cut off the leg than to bandage a toe, it's a matter of luck. Some of the wounded benefit more from having their diagnosis made more “serious,” while others are just a little unlucky.

This corruption has already created its own world, its own Universe. Hence the false statistics, the false picture of the operational-tactical situation, and a bunch of other derivatives. More on this in future letters.”

(END OF TRANSLATION of the August 5th #FSBletters from #WindofChange)
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On the torture and murder of the Ukrainian POW, degeneration of Russian society & army - July 29th Letter from the Wind of Change inside the FSB

Access the Twitter thread here 

Please listen to this first to understand the background & context of the FSB letters:

 
🧵Translation of the July 29th #FSBletters from the #WindofChange inside the FSB to @Vlad_Osechkin
Subjects: Castration and subsequent assassination of the Ukrainian POW, dehumanization of Ukrainians, degeneration of Russian society and the Russian army. (War criminal pictured)


As always, my comments for clarification are in (parenthesis). Wind of Change's parenthesis are in [brackets].

“Concerning the torture of the Ukrainian soldier POW (in reference to the castration of the prison-of-war, captured on video): there is strong division in the Service (FSB) – a portion (of us) is unwilling to accept this, we are insisting on the fact that if the guilty (the torturer) is not punished, that it’d be a total shitstorm. But a very serious contingent (of the FSB) will support the torture conveyor belt - the stage of insanity has been completed.

The unofficial excuse for these bastards is that the POW "insulted" them (the torturers who committed the castration) by calling them pedophiles for having sex with children [I can't assert rape, but it reeks of it].

On the whole, torture has reached a new level. Beside other reasons – a motivated “Russian Army” no longer exists, which would be based on at least some kind of ideology.

There are a number of PMCs [the #WagnerGroup is the largest, but not the only structure], where the motivation is money and "violence without borders", and there are enough psychopaths and maniacs.

Such people won’t be admitted into the (regular) army, as they won’t even pass the examination of the absolutely loyal blind deaf-mute psychiatrist. But mercenaries – no restrictions.

There are prisoners who differ from even the #PMCs with the worst training. They are promised "amnesty for 6 months of war.”

Let me explain on my fingers: the entire war has been going on for less than 6 months, people cannot mentally endure more than 4 months of intensive war, refuseniks are simply rampant.

No one will allow the prisoners rotation or breaks. They will be put where even the PMCs refuse to crawl into. They will be used as bait, that's all.

The army as a coherent system ceases to exist in these conditions. Ask any smart officer in Afghanistan or Chechnya, where, in principle, mutual atrocities were the norm.

If you lose control of discipline, it's the death of the unit. That's why it always had to be dealt with very severely.

PMCs have a semblance of discipline, but there is no ideology and no restrictions. Criminals have no army discipline, by definition. For the army the PMCs an inherently alien element for which there is no empathy.

In terms of torture and uncontrolled violence, the situation continues to deteriorate rapidly. I don't quite understand how it could even be worse (than it already was), but those in charge of controlling the situation claim exactly that.

All stages of dehumanization progressing at lightning speed. Social strata have formed to whom it is no longer possible to explain, even by using various methods of persuasion, why torture and execution are unacceptable.

This is a colossal stratum of society, including civilians, who thirst for torture, blood, and violence.

The stage of dehumanizing Ukrainians has been completely mastered by our propaganda, but here we find ourselves in a place where the old rules do not exist at all.

If someone gives a "recipe" for the dehumanization of Ukrainians, the same recipe works perfectly with the dehumanization of anyone: a bad boss, a nagging neighbor, a screaming boy in the yard.

Under Fascism, German civilians didn't know about concentration camps and torture conveyor belts; we now dream of them [after your posts, thousands of people threaten to "impale on a spike" and "stab" the unwanted, torture the supposedly "bad" in their perverted sense of "good"].

The (Russian) sociology is a monstrosity, six months ago I was looking at everything too optimistically. We now have a social phenomenon with no analogue in recent times. There is no sense in even discussing the rest given this backdrop.

The (Russian) sociology is a monstrosity, six months ago I was looking at everything too optimistically. We now have a social phenomenon with no analogue in recent times. There is no sense in even discussing the rest given this backdrop.

Overall, you can take any of my forecasts from March, April, May - about artificially created #famine, betting on the #Taiwan conflict, blackmailing the West, the collapse of the economy - everything is too predictable.

We can't pull off a full-scale “#GordianKnot,” but nuclear weapons are being considered as an argument. Who knows if they will fly, and if they do, where to.

But I did not expect such a thirst for unrestrained sadism and violence from society itself. I don't know if there is a cure for this. It's a disaster. Sincerely, all the best.” (END OF TRANSLATION of the July 29th #FSBletters from #WindofChange)
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