OMG! Have you heard??? There’s going to be peace in Ukraine. Putin will lead a flock of doves over Kiev whilst hippy Muscovites sing a medley of Bob Dylan songs, translated from the original Yiddish, hugging trees from Odessa to Donetsk and everyone will declare love and brotherhood forevermore…

Almost.

The good news is actually that there is some sort of quasi-proto-coup going on in Russia. And anything that is detrimental to Putin can only be good for every other human on Earth. However, its almost reminiscent to the Nazis being expelled from Berlin at the end of the war when the Russians (agaiaiain? Always the Russians) arrived. When everyone thought “anything’s better than Hitler” and in strolled Stalin, saying (in hindsight) “oh, ya reckon???”

Because the coup which is not a coup, just the taking over of a couple towns around Moscow, so far, is being headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the ‘Wagner Mercenary group’. Which is a seriously nasty, violent, sadistic and evil group of… well, mercenaries, many conscripted from jails in a kind of ‘Dirty Dozen’ moment, who have been fighting in Ukraine for Putin. And for money. Lots of money, but we’ll get to that later.

Prigozhin has been pissed off with the heads of Russian military for months now because his group don’t get the support they need. Like food. Armaments, missiles, tanks, uniforms, pretty much everything. So the group who were doing most of the damage in Ukraine on the Russian side, fell out with the Russians. Prigozhin is NOT opposed to the war. He’d like to escalate it, feels Russia have committed no war crimes and couldn’t give two shits if every school and hospital in Ukraine get blown up fully occupied.

And that really is the bad news. That should this coup unfold into a full-blown take-over and Putin is deposed, then Russia would be under the control of the original ‘Bad Mutha’. Who makes Putin seem like the Archbishop of Canterbury by comparison. And he only deals in cash. Hence the three truckloads of rubles found with about 5 million quid in cash at the Wagner office in St Petersburg.

Although instability in your enemy’s nation is normally a good thing, I don’t think Ukrainians should be uncovering their barbecues any time soon.

All we are saying is ‘Give Peace a Chance’. But it doesn’t translate into Russian.

God help us Saturday

A xxxx