Луд умора няма. 28 области града и във всеки поне по един Альоша . Колко са всичките не зная . Скъпо удоволствие е да се местят всичките в музей , а и защо ? Нали трябва да се помни окупацията от Червените ескадрони . Просто трябва да се сменят сегашните надписи с подходящи отговарящи на истината . Другият вариант е тези истукани да се съберат някъде и наредят в атрактивно композиция някъде на брега на Черно море и така да има полза от тях . Българските Моаи ще привличат туристи и ще си изплатят масрафа по преместването . Въпросът е къде точно да се подредят . Аз съм за северно от Джулая при Камен бряг . https://www.facebook.com/Pitashtiat/posts/pfbid02GuhCnQTvv9vFW7myt7AMXr2hEZ9KQjpZNtEywriZ8qxRYGjikneDRN9m4Ftv1Kbdl А на мястото на МОЧА предлагам да се вдигне паметник на българската Темида пощипвана от Самуил с огнените очи или друга съвременна или древна Мутра . Щото феодала си е Мутра , че и разните Ханове , Канове , Князе , Боляри и прочие паплач .
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Русенците, какво мислите за този стар нов кандидат за кмет от БСП ? Дали ПП-ДБ ще номинират Иван Белчев https://www.facebook.com/BelchevIvan/ и ще гласувате ли за него . Как е въздухът и комарите ?
Поради умствено-културните поражения, нанесени от "реалния социализъм", повечето професии у нас са буквоядски по един особено позорен, провинциален начин. Особено са така юристите. От буквоядство са на път да бастисат важни промени в НК.
Искам юристите този път наистина да ме разберат: за да раздаваш правосъдие не е задължително да си юрист. Познавам англичани (и дори един шотландец), които са "мирови съдии". Нямат ни най-малка представа от юризъм. Но са уважавани и справедливи хора и затова разбират от право. И им е поверено да го раздават. Да не говорим, че в Англия и Америка обикновени граждани - т.е. събрани в "жури" бакали, автомонтьори, учители по география и обикновени безделници - а не юристи отсъждат, кой е виновен и кой не е.
Нека да пазим правото от закона и да не удавяме справедливостта в буквоядство. И: може да се живее в България без човек да е злостен провинциалист и комплексар. Може.
Отвратителен шоумен: възходът на Евгений Пригожин от Вагнер
Путин го създаде. Може ли отявленият наемник да стане следващият президент?
От Пол Ууд
В един ден през 2017 г. бронирано черно BMW спря пред централата на Wagner Group в Санкт Петербург. Вътре настъпи мълчание, когато се разнесе слухът, че Евгений Пригожин , човекът, който отговаряше, е пристигнал.
В една от заседателните зали течеше среща и Пригожин направо влезе в нея. Той представляваше внушителна фигура: набит мъж с глава на куршум на около 50 години, обграден от бодигардове. Но много от неговите служители никога не са го срещали. Групата Вагнер – частна военна компания ( ЧВК ) в страна, където подобни организации се предполагаше, че са незаконни – не съществуваше официално. Пригожин се пазеше толкова сдържано, че младши ръководител, присъстващ на срещата онзи ден, не го разпозна. Според бивш служител, станал свидетел на сцената, младежът станал, за да се представи. Пригожин просто го гледаше втренчено. След това хванал мъжа за ръкава на якето му, извел го в коридора и го ударил силно в лицето.
Малко руснаци биха имали проблеми да разпознаят Пригожин днес. Групата Вагнер се превърна в най-известната наемна сила в света и нейният лидер, повече от всеки генерал, е лицето на войната на Русия в Украйна. Пригожин издава поток от бойни комюникета в Telegram и VKontakte, руския еквивалент на Facebook. Той се изправя срещу военния истаблишмънт, предоставяйки на руснаците рядък поглед върху борбите за власт, които обикновено биха били затворени. Въпреки че изглежда се е провалил в опита си да замени Сергей Шойгу, министър на отбраната, той остава мощен политически актьор, отчасти благодарение на огромното количество последователи, които Вагнер е натрупал в социалните медии.
Въпреки цялата известност на Пригожин, ролята му в силовите структури на Кремъл остава неясна – може би това е начинът, по който Владимир Путин го харесва. Неяснотата относно позицията на Вагнер в командната верига дава на правителството неоспоримо отричане на военните престъпления на групировката в Украйна. Някои млади руснаци виждат Пригожин като герой, предаден от корупцията и некомпетентността в склеротичната военна върхушка. Други смятат, че той е гангстер, който е извадил късмет, или че е инструмент на службите за сигурност, който може да бъде изоставен, когато целта му е изпълнена. Малцина вярват, че той може да узурпира Путин. Самият Пригожин мълчи относно бъдещите си амбиции, но изглежда все по-вероятно той да бъде важен играч в бъдещето на страната си – ако оцелее след избухването и отровите на враговете си от руския елит. За да разберем какво може да направи тази жива фигура след това, поучително е да погледнем трансформациите в миналото му.
One day in 2017, an armoured black BMW drew up outside the headquarters of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg. Inside a hush descended as word spread that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man in charge, had arrived.
A
meeting was under way in one of the conference rooms and Prigozhin
marched straight into it. He cut an imposing figure: a stocky,
bullet-headed man in his mid-50s, flanked by bodyguards. But many of his
employees had never met him. The Wagner Group – a private military company (PMC)
in a country where such organisations were supposedly illegal – did not
officially exist. Prigozhin kept such a low profile that a junior
executive attending the meeting that day didn’t recognise him. According
to a former employee who witnessed the scene, the young man got up to
introduce himself. Prigozhin simply stared at him. Then he took the man
by the sleeve of his jacket, led him into the corridor and punched him,
hard, in the face.
Few
Russians would have trouble recognising Prigozhin today. The Wagner
Group has become the world’s best-known mercenary force and its leader,
more than any general, is the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Prigozhin issues a stream of combative communiqués on Telegram and
VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook. He confronts the military
establishment, affording Russians a rare view of power struggles that
would ordinarily be cloistered. Though he seems to have failed in an
attempt to replace Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defence, he remains a
powerful political actor, thanks in part to the huge following Wagner
has built on social media.
For all
Prigozhin’s notoriety, his role within the Kremlin’s power structures
remains unclear – perhaps that’s the way Vladimir Putin likes it.
Vagueness over Wagner’s position in the chain of command provides the
government with threadbare deniability for the group’s war crimes in
Ukraine. Some young Russians see Prigozhin as a hero betrayed by
corruption and incompetence in the sclerotic military establishment.
Others think he is a gangster who struck it lucky, or that he is a tool
of the security services, who might be ditched when his purpose has been
served. A few believe that he could usurp Putin. Prigozhin himself has
been tight-lipped about future ambitions, but it is looking increasingly
likely that he will be an important player in his country’s future – if
he survives the shivs and poisons of his enemies in the Russian elite.
To understand what this mercurial figure might do next, it is
instructive to look at the transformations of his past.
Yevgeny
Viktorovich Prigozhin was born in 1961 and received as good a start in
life as the Soviet Union could offer. He attended the 62 Sports Boarding
School in Leningrad, a prominent institution that regularly produced
Olympic athletes. According to a document that hackers claim they stole
from Prigozhin’s lawyers, he might have been a professional skier
himself but for an injury.
Instead he
made his first mark on the public record as a criminal. In 1979, aged
18, Prigozhin was given a two-year suspended sentence for theft. While
still on probation, he committed a series of burglaries. There wasn’t
much worth stealing in Soviet-era Leningrad. In February 1980, Prigozhin
and an accomplice broke into an apartment and stole a vase, a napkin
holder and six wine glasses.
Minor
infractions led to more brutal ones. One evening Prigozhin and his
cronies went out celebrating the theft of 250 roubles from a man they
had lured down a dark alley. Prigozhin noticed a young woman in a
“beautiful” coat, according to testimony given by one member of the
gang. They followed the woman into the street and one of them asked her
for a cigarette. As she opened her handbag, Prigozhin grabbed her from
behind by the neck and began to strangle her. She tried to scream but he
gripped her harder. She blacked out and slumped to the ground. One of
the muggers took her boots; Prigozhin ripped off her gold earrings. A
court jailed him for 13 years. He had just turned 20.
Soviet
prisons were pitiless places. Laura Piacentini, a criminologist who
lived among prisoners when the country opened up after the fall of
communism, says the system was devoted to the “relentless pursuit of
utterly brutal, hideous, deeply inhumane violence”. Inmates were housed
in barracks of between 50 and 100 people. The guards encouraged the
prisoners to impose discipline. Daily life was run by vory v zakone – thieves who kept the code.
There
wasn’t much worth stealing in Soviet-era Leningrad. In February 1980,
Prigozhin and an accomplice broke into an apartment and stole a vase, a
napkin holder and six wine glasses
The vory had
strict rules and a sense of honour, however perverse. Piacentini
suspects that they may have despised Prigozhin for ganging up on a lone
woman and treated him badly as a result. The vory also governed
the prison’s economy. They could wangle you a tape deck or a television
and organise protection for your family on the outside. In many ways,
Prigozhin’s time in prison gave him the right skills to thrive in the
new Russia that was emerging outside it.
Prigozhin
was released in 1990, as he was approaching his 30s. He says his fresh
start began by selling hot dogs in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). “We
made the mustard in my apartment in the kitchen. My mother added up our
takings there. I made $1,000 a month. There were mountains of roubles,
so much it was difficult for my mother to count,” he told a newspaper.
He quickly ditched fast food for gastronomy. One of his restaurants was
in the cellars of St Petersburg’s historic customs house and run by a
ruddy, bewhiskered English maître d’. Another was on a converted river
boat that had once been a floating disco.
The
way Prigozhin tells it, his success came through hard work. But others
believe there’s more to it than that. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former
oligarch who was jailed by Putin in 2005, claims that organised crime
and the restaurant scene in St Petersburg were enmeshed. Two of
Prigozhin’s partners in the restaurant business owned a casino, and it’s
hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have encountered mobsters in this
milieu: St Petersburg, says Khodorkovsky, was like “a Russian Chicago”.
Members of Prigozhin’s circle remember the day that the deputy mayor
responsible for, among other things, casinos, dined at one of his
restaurants. His name was Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s
rise to power carried Prigozhin in its slipstream. After Putin became
president in 2000, Prigozhin became the caterer of choice at grand state
occasions, earning him the nickname, “Putin’s chef”. The role offered
him proximity to the most powerful man in the country, not to mention
various world leaders. Photographers snapped him whipping a cloche off
Putin’s dinner and hovering next to President George W. Bush.
Candace
Rondeaux, who lived in St Petersburg in the 1990s and is now an expert
on Wagner, has argued that there was nothing trivial about Prigozhin’s
restaurateur role. Putin, a political novice when he came to power, used
lavish banquets to impress his fellow heads of state. This was no easy
task for Prigozhin, who had to battle food shortages and Russia’s
reputation for abysmal cuisine. He crafted elegant menus out of
traditional ingredients. When Bush was in town, Prigozhin served up
Astrakhan tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, crayfish with gooseberry
marmalade and fried smelt with turnips and baby courgettes (Bush had the
steak).
Prigozhin’s skill at
organising big events made him invaluable to a government that relied on
manipulating appearances. The flamboyance of his set-pieces sometimes
verged on satire. According to leaked emails, at the birthday dinner of
Sergei Ivanov, head of the presidential administration, guests were
offered “Somali ostrich meat, crocodile, grey shark, and piranha”.
(Putin had the steak.)
When Bush
was in town, Prigozhin served up Astrakhan tomatoes and balsamic
vinegar, crayfish with gooseberry marmalade and fried smelt with turnips
and baby courgettes
His
position was one that required great trust. There is a long tradition of
political poisoning in Russia. A former American intelligence officer
told me that the role of the official chef is more important in the
Kremlin than anywhere in the West: “You really have to trust your
personal chef. Big deal.” Putin knew that better than anyone – his
grandfather had been Stalin’s personal chef.
According
to Rondeaux, the Wagner expert, those who provide household services to
the leader and his inner circle can go very far in authoritarian
systems. “The drivers for St Petersburg’s rich and powerful, the
butlers, the maids, the cooks, they rose too. They are [today] the royal
courtiers of Putin’s Russia.” Prigozhin earned contracts to supply food
to schools, prisons and the entire Russian army. Reportedly this earned
him a fortune. More importantly, he preserved Putin’s trust.
Very
few employees of the Wagner Group speak to the media. One who was
willing was Marat Gabidullin, a grizzled veteran who says he left his
position in Russia’s official armed forces in 1993. (It wasn’t possible
to verify all the details of his story, but it was consistent with the
available facts.) Gabidullin says he struggled to settle into civilian
life after leaving the paratroopers. He tried to work as a bodyguard but
shot a Siberian mobster, for which he was sentenced to three years in
prison. An old army buddy told him about the Wagner Group, and he signed
up. He served first in Ukraine, where conflict broke out in 2014
between the government and Russian-backed separatists in the east of the
country, and then Syria, where Russia propped up the regime of Bashar
al-Assad.
Gabidullin
says that in 2016 he was engaged in a firefight with a band of
jihadists near Palmyra in Syria. He didn’t hear the explosion that
tossed him up into the air. Everything blurred, his only sensation the
pain from dozens of pieces of shrapnel lacerating his flesh. He spent
two months in a coma in hospital. When he woke up, still groggy, someone
handed him a phone. “It’s Yevgeny Viktorovich.” It was, said
Gabidullin, “like being phoned by God”. Prigozhin told him that the
Wagner Group would pay for whatever treatment he needed. He promised
Gabidullin a medal and cushy office job. Prigozhin had never worn a
uniform himself (except for prison robes), but he regarded his fighters
as comrades.
How exactly Prigozhin went
from a chef to something resembling a military commander remains
unclear. Gabidullin says that, in the early days, the Wagner Group was
known simply as the Company, and deployed soldiers-for-hire across the
world from Crimea to Syria, and Libya to Congo. In Syria, they trained
local mercenaries and served as shock troops for the regime. In Libya,
they fought for a rebel commander backed by Russia. In the Central
African Republic, Wagner “instructors” supported the government during
the country’s civil war.
The
deserter’s brains are bashed in with a sledgehammer, a method of
execution that has become Wagner’s trademark. Prigozhin called the video
“excellent director’s work”
In
2014 and 2015, men from the group served in Ukraine as “ghost soldiers” –
troops in uniform without identifying insignia. They raided territory
controlled by Ukrainian forces, carried out sabotage missions and took
“hostages”. Their job was to unify the competing armed separatist groups
under one command. Later, rumours circulated that the Wagner Group
arranged the deaths of several separatist commanders who were unwise
enough to make trouble.
After
Gabidullin recovered, he joined Prigozhin’s staff as his personal
assistant. The job gave Gabidullin a ringside view of the organisation.
Media coverage at the time suggested that the Wagner Group’s income came
from its control of Syrian oil wells and refineries. But Gabidullin is
dismissive of this explanation: The Syrian oil industry was “rusting”,
in a “state of collapse”. As far as he could tell, the Wagner Group
didn’t make any money and Prigozhin never paid taxes. Instead, says
Gabidullin, the state transferred funds to pay for operations the
Kremlin required.
In 2017, at the
height of Wagner’s deployment in Syria, Gabidullin reckoned that the
group spent $175m, including $25m in pensions to the families of dead
mercenaries. Prigozhin was able to acquire tanks, armoured vehicles,
rocket launchers and small arms.
Though
some believe Prigozhin is a mere creature of the Kremlin, he did seem
to have a certain amount of latitude to act on his own initiative.
According to Gabidullin, in February 2018 Prigozhin took the “sole
decision” to send his men to seize oil wells in Kurdish-controlled
territory. Prigozhin didn’t realise that American special forces were
operating in the area, a major intelligence failure. When the Americans
saw the mercenaries moving in, they rang the hotline to the Russian
ministry of defence, wanting to make sure they weren’t about to start a
world war if they repelled the attack. The Russians assured the
Americans that they didn’t have anyone in the area. The Americans bombed
the Wagner soldiers, and, according to Gabidullin’s estimate, more than
100 died.
Accounts differ as to how
the debacle was allowed to happen. Some say that Prigozhin had received
permission from the Kremlin for the raid, but the ministry of defence
decided to disavow him because they wanted to cut him down to size.
Gabidullin says there is a simpler explanation. The Russian general who
answered the call had orders “not to interfere” with Wagner, and was
simply obeying these instructions to the letter.
In
February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine. At first the Wagner Group didn’t
seem to have a role in the “special military operation”, as the Kremlin
called the invasion. In fact, Prigozhin’s battle-tested mercenaries were
so conspicuously absent in the early days of the war that theories
began to circulate about why they weren’t there. According to
Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch, Putin did in fact order the Wagner
Group to assassinate Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the very
outset of the invasion. Khodorkovsky is now an opposition figure and
gathers intelligence about the regime from his base in London. He says
Prigozhin’s rivals in the security establishment tipped off the
Ukrainians; supposedly, the operation ended so ignominiously that
Prigozhin fell out of favour. (Khodorkovsky won’t say how he knows
this.)
Bakhmut did not fall
quickly. Prigozhin was left to rage against “slackers” in the rear,
eating “off golden plates” while his men were sent home in coffins
Whatever
the reason for their initial absence from the battlefield, Wagner Group
fighters began to be spotted there within a few months, after Ukraine
resisted more fiercely than expected.
The
Wagner Group’s role was clarified in September 2022, when a remarkable
video popped up on Twitter. It showed Prigozhin in a prison yard,
drumming up recruits. Hundreds of men stand around him as he tells them
that “God and Allah can get you out of here – in a coffin. I can get you
out of here alive.” All they had to do was fight for Wagner in Ukraine.
He dangled a promise many found impossible to resist: “You will not
return back to prison under any circumstances.” He gave them five
minutes to decide whether or not to accept his offer.
Until
that moment, Prigozhin had sued journalists who suggested he had any
kind of relationship with the Wagner Group. Now, he was talking openly
about it. Soon, hardly a day went by without a statement by Prigozhin or
a video on social media, often showing him in full battle dress near
the front line. He opened a new headquarters in St Petersburg, a shiny
glass tower with “PMC Wagner Group” over the door in huge
Cyrillic letters. The insatiable demand for bodies on the frontline
seemed to make him untouchable. He was the salesman the Kremlin needed.
(He also finally admitted to having founded a collective of online
trolls that sought to interfere in the American elections in 2016 –
another claim he had previously denied.)
There
was, however, a warning for the prisoners who signed up: “Those who
arrive [at the front] and on the first day say this is not a place for
them, we mark them as deserters and execute them by firing squad.”
Wagner posted a video of a former prisoner named Yevgeny Nuzhin who had
been freed from a 24-year sentence for murder in order to fight in
Ukraine. He deserted but was recaptured. In the video Nuzhin can be seen
in a dark basement. His head is taped to a brick wall, then his brains
are bashed in with a sledgehammer – a method of execution that has
become Wagner’s trademark. Prigozhin called the video “excellent
director’s work”. He visited a Wagner unit to present them with a
sledgehammer engraved with the words, “For killing rabbits”, meaning
those who fled from fighting.
“He
is a difficult man, not a simple man. It’s a mistake to think of him as
some kind of stupid criminal…He’s very smart and very dangerous.”
Britain’s ministry of defence says there were, at one point, around 50,000 Wagnerovtsy
in Ukraine, four out of five of them former prisoners. Prigozhin was
determined to find glory for Wagner alone. In January he announced that
his “musicians” had taken the town of Soledar, in eastern Ukraine. “I
want to emphasise that no units other than the Wagner fighters took part
in the assault on Soledar.” (This wasn’t true. The Russian army fought
there as well.)
Then he moved farther
east to the town of Bakhmut, which he also claimed Wagner would capture
by itself. But Russia’s generals weren’t prepared to help. According to
Khodorkovsky, both Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov,
the chief of general staff, see Prigozhin’s men as cannon fodder whose
job is to clear minefields by walking through them and identify enemy
positions by drawing fire. Khodorkovsky says Prigozhin wanted heavy
artillery to clear the way for his men, as would happen for regular
units, but the Russian defence establishment wasn’t willing to use up
its limited supply of shells making things easier for the mercenaries.
Bakhmut
did not fall quickly. Prigozhin was left to rage against “slackers” in
the rear, eating “off golden plates” while his men were sent home in
coffins. Russian state TV, which used to lionise
Prigozhin, has barely given him any attention this year, suggesting his
enemies in the political establishment have gained the upper hand.
But
Gabidullin, his former employee, says Prigozhin is at his most creative
when he’s backed into a corner. “He is a difficult man, not a simple
man. It’s a mistake to think of him as some kind of stupid criminal…He’s
very smart and very dangerous.”
At the end of May, Prigozhin claimed to have seized Bakhmut, at the cost of 20,000 Wagernotvsy
lives. He gave a bitter television interview, attacking Shoigu, Sergei
Lavrov, the foreign minister, and other members of “the elites” for
sending their children abroad while ordinary Russians sent theirs to the
front. He almost spat at the camera: “You sons of bitches. Gather up
your offspring and send them to war.”
Moscow
is now abuzz with speculation about Prigozhin’s political ambitions. He
has established himself as a showman, a provocateur and a wit, if a
somewhat crude one. When the European Parliament criticised Wagner, he
sent them a violin case, a reference to his “orchestra”. Inside was a
sledgehammer spattered with red paint – or was it blood? He says he’s
going to run for president – of Ukraine.
Gabidullin
suspects that his old boss doesn’t want the top job in his home
country. “The president of Russia is responsible for everything, all
mistakes, all failures,” Gabidullin says. Instead, he thinks Prigozhin
would like to move into the role left by the death last year of Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist politician who acted as a licensed
critic of the regime. “That’s a very comfortable place. He doesn’t have
to deal with any problems, but he can speak openly…making money from his
status.”
Fiona Hill, formerly the
official in charge of Russia policy on America’s National Security
Council, is also drawn towards the theory that it is politically useful
for Putin to be opposed from the right: it makes him seem reasonable by
comparison. She believes that this calculation is behind a recent slew
of articles in the Russian press talking up the possibility of a
Prigozhin presidency; it may also explain why his seemingly rash
broadsides against the Kremlin have gone unpunished. Prigozhin, says
Hill, has “definitely perfected bombast” and could easily step into the
bogeyman role that Zhirinovsky played.
Hill
has an intriguing take on the power dynamic between Putin and his
convict-chef: she thinks one reason the president keeps Prigozhin so
close is to look tough by association, an image he dearly craves. When
Hill was researching Putin’s biography a few years ago she came to
suspect that all the stories that make up the Russian leader’s personal
lore – the scrappy kid fighting in the courtyard of his Leningrad
apartment block; his KGB personality assessment saying that he suffered from a “diminished sense of danger” – came from Putin himself.
“Sometimes
I wonder how tough Putin really is,” she says. “Having sat right next
to him, he doesn’t really exude it himself in person...his physicality
is tightly wound but he’s not physically intimidating.” Perhaps
Prigozhin suspects his boss is not as powerful as he pretends to be.
Perhaps, suggests Hill, he looks at Putin and asks himself, “Why not
me?”
