They have already entered Rostov on Don (a major city in the south, million+ population) and took over a whole bunch of administrative buildings in the city center. Apparently there's another column of his moving towards Moscow. Absolutely insane.
Someone mentioned that this could counter intuitively make Putin stronger like a coup in Turkey in 2016 where they purged the opponents of the government after a failed coup.
But I have a hard time believing that. Hard to see how Putin can handle too much of this sort of thing.
Which actually somewhat creates the inverse problem (and not unknown in Russia, Soviet or otherwise): competent generals have largely been purged already, hence the reliance on the W.G. and its chef.
I'm not sure what Prigozhin's chances of successfully pulling off a coup are (nonzero?), but Russia has been heading for an unambiguous military loss for a while already and now is looking at a complete military disaster (loss of Crimea is on the table), even if Putin manages to bring Wagner under control. I don't see how this is politically survivable. What's the spin? "Ok, I sacrificed tens of thousands of Russians on a catastrophic invasion, but at least I managed to stop a coup from my career-criminal personal cook (whom I also outsourced a good part of the war effort under his blatantly unconstitutional private military outfit to)."?
I have long thought the West should be a lot more scared about what it's going to look like if the country with the world's largest nuclear arsenal becomes completely destabilized. Seems like we're going to find out.
Posts by Prigozhin are censored in Russian social media but those who access uncensored media like Telegram knew everything for very long time already.
It is likely that Prigozhin will be taken care of, but if not this does not bode well for Russia or Russians.
Or for Ukraine and Ukrainians. Note how he is always careful to say he does not mean to distract Russian forces from attacking Ukraine. And if he takes over chances are he can actually improve military, which no thanks
Users are flagging them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I don't think it's so hard to guess: this is a sensational, politicized story, it's too early to tell how significant it is, and there isn't a lot of intellectually curious conversation to be had here. We sometimes turn off flags, but in this case I'm inclined to side with the users.
p.s. Sometimes it's really good for HN to be the place that you don't come to for coverage of something sensational. We just had a ton of threads about the submersible that imploded; not to mention the shit-ton of threads about the reddit that imploded. I don't think it's good for HN to do every implosion.
Edit: after looking things over in the morning, I found myself persuaded by the arguments in favor of this story, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page. That's probably still frustrating to people who wanted a heat-of-the-moment thread, but that's not really what HN is about.
Interesting. So, discussion on the outbreak of war was allowed as an exception, but the coup that maybe ends the war is verboten? I'd love to read the mod chat from that discussion ;) assuming you aren't acting unilaterally?
Oh, it's sensational, is it? Well, yes, I suppose a coup that ends a bloody war (that is contributing, if only ideologically, to the crippling economic policies all over The West) would be rather sensational, wouldn't it?
Edit: Related question, why can I vouch for some flagged comments, but not for others?
Edit: Think I figured that out. Vouch is only for dead, not just flagged?
There hasn't been a coup and the war hasn't ended. You guys are way ahead of yourselves. If something of historical significance happens, there will be plenty of time to discuss it.
The team here is small so a lot of the decisions are indeed unilateral. We don't all keep the same hours.
Yes, we appreciate the mod team's efforts throughout. Nevertheless, this event is turning into something historic, even if it ends up in failure for the instigators.
There are certain stories where it's better for HN to not be about that. This feels like one of them to me; I'm happy to be wrong if the story turns out otherwise, but the current reports are far too politicized to evaluate objectively.
Edit: after looking things over in the morning, I found myself feeling persuaded by the arguments in favor of this story, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page. That's probably still frustrating to people who wanted a heat-of-the-moment thread, but that's not really what HN is about.
I see your point (and said something similar in a different comment) but at the same time, the two stories differ in ways that touch the core of what HN is about—so this isn't just an arbitrary call.
For example, that story was less likely to degrade into flamewar; this one is highly likely to. That story, although morbid, had more entry points for intellectually interesting conversation than this one. That story was closer to HN's sweet spot topic-wise; this one is far from it. That story was likely to be accurately reported because it wasn't high-stakes politically; precisely the opposite for this one. That story was less likely to get dominated by predictable talking points and pre-existing opinions [1]; this story is likely to get little else. And so on.
There's a higher-level consideration too: it isn't a good idea for HN to be too consistent. That would be predictable, predictability is uninteresting, and we're trying to optimize for the opposite [2]. The best strategy is the other way around: try to be unpredictable from any sequence [3]. So any time you see $foo-story-1, $foo-story-2, for any value of $foo, it's best to steer away from $foo-story-3. I know this is frustrating for people who prefer formal, predictable rules, but it's good for curiosity.
Unfortunately, it's also frustrating for people who have legit reasons to care deeply about $foo-story-3, and that's a different phenomenon—I empathize with that feeling and it's not something we're doing on purpose. All I can say is that such topics exist for every reader, so everyone ends up getting frustrated in this way. Hopefully it evens out in the long run.
Edit: all that said, I reread the comments and found your and others' argument more persuasive than my own, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page.
[1] (we did get predictable raging against corner-cutting billionaires, but that was about it)
Moreover: if you think a post was unfairly flagged, you can email mods (hn@ycombinator.com) and request that flags be suspsended.
Mods can make the call to reinstate a post or let it stand, and I suspect in this case the flags might remain. But occasional political posts (US presidential elections come to mind) and other large news events occasionally clear the hurdle.
(I email with vouches occasionally myself, with mixed results.)
If it were true, it would make no sense to try to censor it, so I'm going to bet on it being a joke?
I really have no idea who would care specifically about censoring it on HN, anyway.
I always thought everything he said was on orders from the highest, either to troll Western media, or else to make the regular military nervous so they wouldn't start a coup.
Just to follow up on that last sentence, I read this, today, confirming I wasn't the only one thinking it:
"So accustomed are we to viewing Putin as a master tactician, that the opening salvos of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s disobedience were at times assessed as a feint – a bid by Putin to keep his generals on edge with a loyal henchman as their outspoken critic."
The reason is that there is a lot of noise and as of now all articles posted are regurgitating the same bits of "he says" with no hard evidence.
Everyone has the same facts: there are some green men with guns and there are some green men with guns that just arrived. Some people are quick to call some of them Wagner. (Which by itself would also not mean much, thinking the entirety of Wagner group supports the coup is just as much of a leap with no evidence.)
There is indirect evidence pointing to takeover of Rostov to piece together, but it exists mostly in the shape of fragmentary telegram posts. There seems to be a lot of that evidence, enough that it seems plausible, but even people on the ground next to those green men have no idea.
The most striking bit of evidence I saw so far seems a screenshot (but of course without a link) of Russian TASS captioning a photo of some of those green men as "Wagner troops". Just because it's such a detail it would be hard to come up with it as a fake. But that is still assuming this is not an editorial mistake because the photo must have been taken just minutes prior.
(Edit, now there's a video that seems to show Prigozhin indeed in Rostov giving ultimatum to military: https://t.me/nexta_live/55212)
Would you please stop posting these unsubstantive flamewar comments? You've been doing altogether too much of this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
