Leave It To Fox News To Offer Bizarre Rationale for Wagner Uprising Against Putin
Author claims Putin, Prigozhin orchestrated rebellion in a "false-flag operation"
The stunning challenge to Vladimir Putin's authority over Russia this past weekend was actually a plan hatched by Putin and the head of the private mercenary group which carried out the rebellion to try to confuse President Biden.
That's the bizarre claim by an analyst on Fox News.
While most US analysts and experts saw the now-abortive rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group troops as an extraordinary rebuke against Putin and the Russian leader's long war in Ukraine.
However, Fox News on Sunday featured author and analyst Rebekah Koffler to offer a completely different — and outlandish — origin for the the advance against Moscow Prigozhin and his soldiers carried out before turning back just short of their objective.
Prigozhin and many of his forces in the private Wagner Group led an unprecedented 24-hour crisis against Putin's rule before a deal ultimately was struck that ended the march on Moscow and would send Prigozhin into exile in neighboring Belarus.
In their lightning advance, Prigozhin’s forces on Saturday took control of two military hubs in southern Russia and got within about 120 miles of Moscow before retreating.
Koffler called the entire incident “all staged.”
“My intelligence analysis suggests, Eric, that this is a classic false flag operation, that it has been orchestrated by Putin and Prigozhin,” she said. “Prigozhin is not a stupid man. He is a highly intelligent, you know, formerly a convict, he turned his life around from a prisoner to a hot dog stand owner to the owner of a multi-billion catering business that served the Kremlin, including Putin himself.
“Putin, who is paranoid of being poisoned, let Prigozhin serve him food and drink. There’s absolutely no chance that Prigozhin could have possibly orchestrated this March for justice, as he called it, all the way to Moscow,” Koffler added.
Asked why Putin and Prigozhin would team up in this peculiar way, Koffler offered an equally far-out — and convoluted — reason.
“What we are talking about right now, all the analysts that have spoken prior to me have said those words: Putin is weak, Putin’s hold on power is weakened. It’s exactly what Putin wants us to believe because remember, there is a Russia/Ukraine conflict going on right now,” she said. “Putin is hemorrhaging forces. What he is afraid of is the deployment of NATO forces into the theater in Ukraine, in which case he would almost certainly lose the war.
“And so, he wants to demonstrate the cognitive disconnect in the analysis of Washington establishment, specifically President Biden,” Koffler added. “On the one hand, people like [Republican Sen] Lindsey Graham and others including President Biden himself, they said this man can no longer remain in power.
“On the other hand, they are saying he is weak, but then they are saying he is going to go after a NATO country, right? If he is weak, Putin wants to believe that he is weak, that there is an ongoing threat of a military insurrection — there is an actual doctrine that is called reflexive control that the general staff has developed. What does it mean?” Koffler continued. “They study the mindset of the adversary, meaning us, and they figure out, what is the confirmation bias? What are we likely to believe? So, this is a pretext to declare martial law, which Putin has already done, he made an amendment today that anybody who is violating the martial law is going to be imprisoned for 30 days.”
Please support our work…
Also, please subscribe…