re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin says more than 5,000 former prisoners are now free since they received pardons after fulfilling contracts with Wagner Group.

Prigozhin adds that 0.31 percent of the prisoners who have returned to the Russian Federation committed new crimes within a month. He says that’s “10–20 times less than standard indicators” recorded before the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

“Basically, people who commit crimes [inflict] varying degrees of injury on people who yoke themselves to the Kyiv regime and oppose the work of the special military operation. Therefore, I can say with confidence: we’ve lowered crime in Russia tenfold, and we’ve trained former prisoners better than they trained Pioneers and Little Octobrists during Soviet times,” said Prigozhin.

Olga Romanova, head of the foundation Russia behind Bars, said in January that of the 50,000 former prisoners recruited by Wagner Group, only 10,000 remain with the private military company. “The rest have either been killed, wounded, gone MIA, deserted, or surrendered.”

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Netanyahu fired his defense minister over not supporting his judicial reforms. Reservists are threshing to not respond to IDF service. Now the masses are protesting.

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On their last trip in to Lebanon about 40% of their reservist didnt report when called. Bibi is trying to tighten that up but their younger generation is similar to ours, they want nothing to do with the military.

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Does this have any tie to recent actions against Iran?

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Seems a terrible time to have this happen for them.

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If it is the case that attitudes towards cease-fires and eventual peace settlements depend on the outcomes of the battles for territory currently underway, and if Russia continues to underperform and decides it needs to pause the conflict and even find a way to wind it down, then Putin’s first call will most likely be to Xi. If this is at all possible Ukraine and its Western supporters to start work on how to respond. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has observed, ‘Ukraine will likely regain its territory through a mix of military and diplomatic means. ’ Any diplomatic means is likely to have a role for China.

One indication of whether a serious diplomatic initiative can develop may come with the visit of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to Beijing. He will soon take over the rotating presidency of the European Union. Sanchez has said that he will tell Xi ‘that it is the Ukrainians themselves who will lay down the conditions for the beginning of this peace, when it arrives,’ and that

‘the most important – the most fundamental – thing is to preserve an international rule-based order, which depends on respecting the UN charter. One of those fundamental principles is respecting territorial integrity – in this case the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which is being violated by President Putin.’

This is the core Western position and Ukraine’s conditions for peace depend on Russian withdrawal. That will not change. But it will be hard to ignore any movement on the Russian side if this is communicated through Beijing. President Macron is also scheduled to visit Beijing next month. Xi might like to work with Europeans on a new initiative if only to wean them away from the United States, assumed to be irredeemably hostile.

All this is speculative for now, but the Americans need to think about the implications of developments of this sort, not least because the Biden Administration will still be central to any future diplomacy, and it will not to be caught out by a flurry of activity that creates problems in trans-Atlantic relations.

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China could be the exit Putin needs. If it’s as Chinese plan it might give Putin cover.

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Of course China is looking for a way to elevate themselves on the world stage

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That sounds like wishful thinking to me, but you may be right.

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