Putin Talks Free Fertilizer for Hungry Africa but Problem Dog Prigozhin Spoils the Picture
Bananaization of Russia under Putin continues fast apace
Vladimir Putin just finished hosting Dmitry Mazepin at the Kremlin. Mazepin is an oligarch, and a bigshot at the Russian Union of Industrialists, a big business interest group.
Mazepin is also the owner of Russian fertilizer giant Uralchem.
The oligarch briefed Putin on Uralchem’s efforts to transport some of the 262,000 tons of fertilizer frozen in European ports to African countries for free. Europeans no longer want the fertilizer but their sanctions are also blocking its transport so the Russians are working with the UN to unfreeze it for charity.
Mazepin also reminded Putin that the July deal to lift the Russian naval blockade of Ukraine for grain ships included language that signatories will support the export of Russian ammonia, but that this export remains impossible.
Uralchem would normally export ammonia — a component in fertilizer — via a pipeline to Odessa port. But since the war, Ukraine has closed the pipeline citing US sanctions on suspected Uralchem owners Dmitry Mazepin and Arkady Rotenberg.
The grain deal extension that was just signed this month also includes some of this aspirational ammonia language, but again to no effect.
Putin assured Mazepin that Russia will be working to try to get the UN and Ukraine to reopen the export pipeline. (Something Zelensky has said is possible only if Russia agrees to a POW exchange on the basis of “all for all”.)
There are different angles that Putin’s interest in ammonia and fertilizer exports could be seen from.
1. An idealist might say that getting fertilizer out to the hungry world was important and that this was precisely the noble and humanist pursuit that a Russian leader should be associated with.
2. A cynic might say that in the middle of a bloody war that he was sending regular Ivans from Sverdlovsk to fight and die in, it was in poor taste of Putin to make the monetary losses for a fertilizer oligarch a big concern of his.
3. A realist might say that whether laudable or deplorable, all this ammonia business was small-fry and the last thing a war leader should be spending his time on. This is supposedly an “existential” war against “satanism” that Putin has already sacrificed 25,000 Russian lives to. One in which the path to victory seems very uncertain and that the West has unloaded so many weapons into that it is starting to run out of things to send. So why isn’t Putin spending his every waking minute visiting every last foundry, steel mill, and defense plant in the country, ringing their ears to increase production and twisting the arms of moneymen to give them everything they need, regardless of the cost? (Instead Moscow doesn’t even want to pay for the mobilization but is instead pushing the cost onto the regions.)
At the same time as Putin was hosting Mazepin to discuss the humanitarian subjects of fertilizer for Africans and profits for oligarchs, Russia's richest prison gang, Wagner PMC was sending a “message” to Euro parliament. The “message” turned out to be a red-stained hammer implying that it was the hammer used in the murder of Yury Nuzhin.
Putin is at least partly singing onto fertilizer giveaways and talking about them for PR reasons. So I wonder why Prigozhin is allowed to run around spoiling this.
Regardless of whether Putin should be spending energy on the opening up of an ammonium pipeline through Ukraine, Prigozhin certainly shouldn’t feel himself free to send a murder weapon to Euro parliament while that is happening. And how is it going to reflect on Russia’s image? Certainly not in a way that any normal Russians can welcome, I can tell you that. The Russian mainstream reaction on Yaplakal forums is heavily negative as you might expect.
Arguably there might be a utility to keeping a dog like Prigozhin with his career-criminal world outlook around. I would argue against it, but maybe there is such a reason. But there is absolutely no reason not to leash such a dog, but to allow him to run around to the point of now even interfering with foreign policy.
We can talk about all the ways the Russian state was eroded in the 1990s during Yeltsin, but even Yeltsin didn’t find himself with a part of his foreign policy outsourced to an ex-convict oligarch.
tx you, AE
Now, I lost hope in the narrative "holy Russia will deliver West Europe from wokism"
(I feel so stupid to have believed in such story)
(anyway, I still think EU's economical 'sanctions" will destroy western wokist regimes, simply by economical RUIN.)
(will I be also stupid with this narrative ?)
Maybe time to give another try, with the 'old/new' parallels thing; we can only hope that 'local' attack dawgs will forgo the rabid hijack thing... and let this line of thinking finally have an airing.
Old is new... all over agin. Prigozhin - and the Chechen Leprechaun for that matter too - is an AUXILARY of the (neo-bolshie)imperium. He and his forces are barbarians from beyond the (allowable)borders of "the Third Rome - tm." They fight/forward murder weapons/fulminate coups & implicitly threaten a SACK of the holy city on the Muscovy ... because the Emperor is weak, his forces are disloyal or declining in number and ability both... and because ALL empires end up trying to save themselves via buying off the foe at their gates.
And this time around, there are no brave and capable Legionary commanders able to save the center. Surovikin barely managed to save his own hide, and get out of Kherson with some semblance of dignity. Nobody else waiting in the wings to save the day...
save for... the horrible Huns like Prigo & the Leprechaun. No imaginary "afghan commandos," Syrian guerrillas, even Siberian tigers. Vlad will throw "imperial aurei" at the duo until they get tired of eating off gold plate and drinking from silver goblets. - and start hunting for better sport in the coliseum itself.
Hitler's imaginary army to hold at the Elbe/Dnipro. The Turkic/Muslim mercenaries who deserted the Emperor at the battle of Manzikert. Vlad's persistent delusion of 'a decisive victory' over the 'holhols.' Every night now, the waking nightmares invade the jittery dreamscape of the new/old Czar.
Prigo snickers in the forelight of the camp fires where he and his crew eat meat dripping with fat from gawd only knows what sources. Somewhere out there in the night, another "battle group" is in it's death throes, and the balance of power shifts ever more towards the horde and it's horrible master.