Prigozhin Gone? Xi Departed? COVID Back? Thinking Through the Impossible

Is it a coincidence that Prigozhin is Dead and Xi disappears in the same 24 (or maybe even 12) hours? It seems that Prigozhin’s plane crashed at 6 p.m. Moscow time on Tuesday. Xi was scheduled to give a long-anticipated, highly-planned speech at about that same time at the BRICs Summit in South Africa. But, he inexplicably bolted. This was only the second visit abroad for him since the end of the COVID lockdown. Note the coup rumors that swirled around his first trip abroad to Samarkand for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in September 2022. It was said that he had been placed under house arrest upon his return. Some observers wrote of PLA military vehicles heading towards Beijing and some regional capitals. Commercial flights were canceled and grounded.

Similarly, today, the theatre of geopolitics is suddenly moving very quickly. Many other things have also happened in this consequential 24-hour period. President Putin dismissed  Sergei Surovikin as head of Aerospace forces. The so-called “General Armageddon” had been missing ever since Prigozhin’s attempted coup in June. Now, he is suddenly fired on the same day Prigozhin is killed? On almost the same day, the Head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, publicly announced that Crimea will soon be liberated. In the background, there were suddenly reports of intensified “friendly fire” as Russians fired on Russians on the Ukrainian front line. This had happened before, but one gets the sense that this new episode was either about a fight between Pro-Putin and Pro-Wagner Russians or because Russian troops would rather fire on themselves than face the wrath of their leader for failing in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, let’s understand that the economies in both Russia and China are imploding. The Blood and Billions that Ukraine has cost Russia are overwhelming the ability to produce GDP. As I recently suggested, Russia’s main funding source was from the Wagner Group’s activities in Africa. Only the day before his death, Prigozhin appeared in a video in full camouflage, apparently in 50-degree heat, somewhere in North Africa, where he spoke of “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even freer.” In other words, he emphasized that Wagner had control over the African cash and food flows. Then he was gone (let’s still allow for chances that this, too, is theater). Russia loses not just an opponent to the current leader but perhaps some very significant cash and food flows as well. Given the weakness of the Russian economy, one has to ask if this is a mortal blow not just to Prigozhin but to the Russian economy as a whole.

Meanwhile, back in Beijing, the economy is also imploding under the weight of massive debt. Only a few days ago, the massive Evergrand filed for bankruptcy protection in the US courts.

Notice Xi’s. language in the speech that he released but did not deliver at the BRICs event. His speech read, “But just as a crisis may bring chaos, it can also spur change. A lot will ride on how we handle the crisis.” Interesting.

As a kid, I grew up in fear of the massive, dangerous behemoth called the Soviet Union which bore down on my hometown of Washington DC with enough nuclear missiles to destroy Earth. It was a visceral fear that everyone learned to live with. Then, the totally unexpected happened. It just disappeared. It was there, and then, suddenly, poof, it wasn’t. Now, people say, “No one saw it coming,” but that’s not true. My father, Dr. Harald Malmgren, long warned that the Russian economy was simply not able to sustain itself. He said it would implode. Then it did. No one could believe that something that big and scary could just disappear. We cannot imagine it. Yet, this is exactly how it happens.

The warnings are there, but people ignore them. As my friend Adam Robinson points