In his most recently televised rant on Friday May 5th, 2023, Evgeny Prigozhin’s severely criticized both Sergey Shoigu as well as Valeriy Gerasimov, both on Russia’s extremely tight general staff, for their failure to provide munitions to Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. In response to the shortage of munitions, Prigozhin announced his intention to withdraw on May 10th, 2023.
On Saturday May 6th, 2023 Kadirov announced that he would send several divisions of his elite Akhmat forces to Bakhmut. “In light of recent events, I would like to announce that Chechen divisions are ready to expel from the given urban centre Ukrainian and NATO bandits. We will solve that problem and we are already preparing divisions for the fulfillment of that challenge,” said Kadirov.
On Sunday Moscow announced that both Shoigu and Gerasimov promised to send munitions. Prigozhin subsequently reversed course.
Prior to Prigozhin’s claim that the Wagner Group began to suffer losses for lack of munitions, a widely circulated story on the Wagner Group’s explorations deep within the mine shafts of Soledar depicted the discovery of large amounts of Soviet era munitions.
The exact number, which Prigozhin himself retold in a televised rant on Telegram, came to no less than 290,000 containers of munitions. The contains of munitions contained Kalashnikov rifles, Soviet era machine guns, or ammunition for either type of implement.
It defies logic that Prigozhin could denounce either Gerasimov or Shoigu for lack of munitions after the discovery of more than 290,000 containers of munitions were found within the mine shafts of Soledar’s arsenal. It appears that there is likely more than meets the eye with respect to Evgeny Prigozhin’s rants.
After the carefully choreographed rant, he received assurances for more munitions, Prigozhin announced that no less than 20 square kilometers remains before Bakhmut is completely sacked. He stated: “If you storm the city, then the city will be taken.”
Prigozhin’s latter statement did not fall on deaf ears, at least for Ukrainian military sources, especially those closest to the fighting in Bakhmut. General Sirisky, whois closest to the fighting in Bakhmut, announced that Prigozhin intends to terminate the siege of Bakhmut with the capture of its remaining territory on Russia’s May 9th holiday.
It is entirely predictable that Prigozhin’s forces would cause the city to fall on the May 9th holiday. Only a short while ago, Russian news media sources announced that the Wagner Group had foreclosed on all “asphalt” roads leading into the city. The least predictable, albeit the most important development, is Kadirov’s dispatch of Akhmat divisions to join Prigozhin’s Wagner Group in Bakhmut.
It does not appear to have been the case any time prior to Kadirov’s recent announcement that Akhmat forces have joined Wagner Group forces on a single battlefield at any time during the Ukraine war. It would appear as though the decision to join forces is the result of a newly founded agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the eventual fate not just of Bakhmut or the Ukraine war but Ukraine itself.
There is reason to believe that Russians have highly developed plans for what is to come after the fall of Bakhmut. Kadirov stated that he is confident Artemovsk would be liberated, “despite various attempts to exaggerate the outcome of Ukrainian armed forces’ Spring counteroffensive.”
“We have already started to develop our strategy of action for [the Donbas] together with the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Defense, taking into to account the enemy’s tactics and the resources we have,” Kadirov stated.
It is likely that the development of a “strategy of action” extends far beyond the fall of Artemovsk to what lies beyond. Russian President Vladimir Putin entered into a high level discussions with Kadirov, one of now Russia’s most powerful leaders after Putin, to speculate on the immensely complicated challenge of the further annexation of territory beyond the Donbas. If Bakhmut falls, so goes the logic of any discussion on the next steps of the war, the remaining territorial acquisitions would have to form a government.
But forming a government along the same line as Lughansk, Donets, or Crimea is more complicated than for the areas beyond Bakhmut. It is highly likely that chief among the considerations on forming a government in any newly acquired territory centers on who would govern beyond the Donbas where there is not necessarily a fully fledged Russian speaking population of native Ukrainians.
In territories outside of the Donbas, which have been aligned with Russia more or less fully since 2014, there is not as strong a following as one might like to exploit for the establishment of a proxy government like those in Lughansk, Donetsk, or Crimea. A new government would therefore need to be formed on an entirely different basis. It would be a military dictatorship.
It is likely that these discussions proceeded in much the same way as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s discussions of Ukraine as the “world’s largest construction site” proceeded with Blackrock’s founder (i.e., as a potential source of investment for further exploitation). In that regard, the most likely topic of discussion for Kadirov’s Akhmat forces, who would likely be required to remain behind the lines to enforce the military dictatorship, would be the establishment of a khanate or an Islamically controlled proxy government where one or more of Kadirov’s relatives, as a puppet, rules over any newly acquired territory answering first to Kadirov who answers ultimately to Putin.
The arrangement would likely proceed immediately according to Russia’s current models for business. One of the models Russia employs as an expedient is the so-called Special Economic Zones. A Special Economic Zone, for instance, is a tax free zone where businesses meet with no bureaucratic red tape. Under such a model, businesses for mining, refineries, or factories could easily spring up quickly.
It is likely that the overall prize for service on the battlefields of Ukraine for Akhmat’s forces is a khanate whose Special Economic Zone is open for exploitation primarily to members of Kadirov’s inner circle with a provision for access secondarily to Russians. Territories captured outside of the Donbas could therefore likely be designated as an Akhmat Khanate, an Islamic, military dictatorship controlled by Akhmat forces.
It is likely that the next city to fall in the Ukraine war, should the war continue, would be Kupiansk, which is located to the the North-West of Bakhmut. Following the fall of Kupiansk, the Akhmat forces together with the Wagner Group would move through Kharkiv towards the “great bend at the river Dnipro.”Why Kharkiv? Kharkiv is home to the remainder of Ukraine’s northeastern deposits of minerals, gas, or raw materials. The deposits are among the richest in all of Europe.
A recently published article by the Washington Post, for instance, exposes the area, amount, or type of raw material, mineral or gas deposited in north eastern Ukraine. Entitled, “In the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation’s mineral and energy wealth,” the article, which was published on August 10th, 2022, details how coal, oil, metals, or natural gas are spread from the Dnipro to Kharkiv in north eastern Ukraine.
With an Akhmat Khanate established in northeastern Ukraine along the border with Belarus to the North, the Akhmat Khanate would extract the raw materials, gases, metals or minerals from the regions with the help of cheap labor from the former Soviet commonwealth countries in the southern caucuses (i.e., Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzistan or Kazakhstan), while securing Belarus’ southern flank on the Khanate’s northern border.
It appears that these types of discussions or discussions most resembling these considerations are likely responsible for Kadirov’s decision to dispatch Akhmat divisions to Bakhmut. As Clausewitz explains, war is politics. As soon as the battles are fought, lost or won, the victor’s spoils is a mandate for the implementation of policy.
Putin, who understands the devastating toll the war has taken on his rule over the Russian people, needs Kadirov’s forces to buttress his failure to galvanize broad sections of the Russian working class into fratricide. Kadirov is well aware of his ability to leverage Putin’s support for an opportunity. Accordingly, the realpolitik for negotiating the spoils of war is clearly delineated.
An Akhmat Khanate is certainly in the back of Kadirov’s mind, as Kadirov, perhaps more than any one else in Russia, is experiencing a surge in support from Vladimir Putin as a result of his continued exploitation of the Chechen population for war against Ukrainian armed forces in Ukraine.
It is likely that Kadirov would sign major agreements for the import of these deposits to Saudi Arabia, which is currently engaged in major operations to clear land for mines to extract raw materials throughout the desert laden country, China or Iran.
Against the establishment of an Akhmat Khanate, the working people of Ukraine, whose entire political life is now subject to a censure far greater than anything imaginable under the Central Intelligence Agency’s revivification of Operation CHAOS, must seek to establish an independent political party for the revivification of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic but under the banner of the Fourth International.
Zelensky’s regime, which works closely together with the CIA to coordinate attacks not just on Russians but on Ukrainian dissidents in a manner not restrained by American law as Operation CHAOS had been, is a thoroughly corrupt proxy force whose continuation of a collusion course with Russia, a military superpower with literally inexhaustible experience in military affairs dating back to Catherine the Great’s seizure of Crimea in 1783, portends a dangerous catastrophe of global proportion.
Seymour Hersh’s exposition of the Biden administration’s destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline triggered a massive renaissance in his works on journalism, especially his work to expose the illegal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency’s “family jewels” from the 1970s. The “family jewels” (i.e., the exceptionally anti-Constitutional activities of Operation CHAOS) are circulating once again within the hands of saboteurs who face the greatest crisis in the history of the United States of America, the existential crisis of American democracy in the 21st century.