The Calm Before The Storm

In the rapidly advancing era of digital technology, social media platforms have gained immense significance as indispensable tools for communication. These emerging networks are steadily taking the place of radio or television and are completely changing the way in which information is designed and delivered. The explosion of social media platforms was made possible and accessible by the plurality of actors present in the digital media industry. These platforms have not only connected individuals across the globe, enabling them to share information and ideas, but have also assumed a formidable role in shaping relationships between nations’ political landscapes. This newly acquired efficiency and accessibility comes with various side effects, some being more impactful than others. The challenges created by social media and its implications are unpredictable and widespread.

Since its inception, social media has seen a steady rise in its usage for activism and political participation: the advent of new social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many others has transformed politics worldwide. Political and business leaders as well as organizations have recognized the potential of these platforms to reach a broader audience, engage with voters, solicit support, and most importantly, shape public opinion. The speed and accessibility of social media comes with its own disadvantages. Being a relevantly new platform used by a wider range of people, its users can sometimes be presented with unfiltered information that leads to the spread of misinformation, especially in the field of politics, mainly due to the lack of enforcement measures against extremist and discriminatory statements by users. Technology has rapidly produced various new means of creating misinformation, such as deepfake and AI manipulation, which makes it much more difficult for the average user to distinguish between real and fake news. There are various examples of such manipulations: the famous deepfake video showing the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announcing his surrender to Russia’s invasion, subsequently struck down by fact-checkers, dates back to March 2nd, 2022, whereas on June 5th, 2023 a falsified Putin speech aired a presidential martial law declaration in the Russian regions of Belgorod, Rostov, and Voronezh.

The extensive use of social media, nowadays accessible to virtually everybody at any time, has also fostered the phenomena of citizen journalism and real-time reporting, which are characterized by a much wider and faster reach than traditional media platforms. Indeed, much of the information we receive from conflict zones is reported by individuals who are directly involved in the events, oftentimes providing alternative perspectives and bypassing traditional media channels. Real-time reporting through social media can raise international awareness and prompt humanitarian responses, but it also entails some side effects. Extremist groups exploit social media through similar methods to recruit followers, spread their ideologies, and plan deadly attacks. These challenges can represent a tough mountain to climb for counterterrorism efforts tasked with monitoring and addressing the online presence of extremist content.

One widespread phenomenon is the recognition by the Islamic State of the power of digital media. They started by uploading grainy videos of terrorist groups’ executions to the internet through a variety of platforms ranging from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Telegram and Surespot were particularly used by this extremist group to recruit new members and further their ideals. According to the article by Brendan I. Koerner, the October 2015 report by the Quilliam Foundation titled Documenting the Virtual Caliphate stated that the organization used to release an average of “38 new items per day—20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in languages ranging from Russian to Bengali” during its peak period.

A similar phenomenon was seen in both the US and Europe. In the former case, a research brief by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism estimated that social media had a big role in the radicalization processes of lone actors in the United States in the period going from 2005 to 2016. In the latter case, the European Commission published a report on February 25th, 2022 on the Extremists’ Targeting of Young Women on Social Media and Lessons for P/CVE (Global Programme on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism), denouncing a worrying rise in the use of social media by extremist, defamatory, misogynistic, and identitarian groups to target the young audience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Memes were first introduced as a concept by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 work The Selfish Gene, in which he defined them as units of cultural information spread by imitation. The term originally came from the Greek “mimema”, meaning “imitated”, and they were considered as the cultural parallel to biological genes in that they’re able to control their own reproduction and ends: just like selfish genes do from a generation to another, memes can carry information, replicate and transmit from one person to another through imitation, all of this by adapting to cultural evolution. The use of the term “meme” in the internet was subsequently introduced in 1994 by Mike Godwin in an article published by Wired.

Memes were around way before the widespread use of the internet. The first example of a meme arguably dates back to 1919 and 1920, but the most famous one was a comic published in a 1921 newspaper, in which the tendency of people to see themselves differently from how they appear in pictures was mocked. The comic was later popularized on the internet, thanks to which memes started to gain popularity and were consistently used in various fields outside entertainment, even reaching politics and inter-state relations in the last few years.

Due to their mainly ironic nature, memes are often used as a form of satire and criticism towards politicians and political events as a way to hold leaders accountable by exposing their absurd or controversial actions. On the other hand, memes can also be used by state and political actors in campaigns to shape international narratives and present their viewpoints in a relatable and shareable format. Even in this regard, there are some risks: the emulative way in which memes usually spread could be used for purposes differing from mere satire and criticism, such as trying to mask extremist ideologies behind electoral propaganda. There are many examples throughout history of the use of memes to influence the results of an election, like in the most recent case of the massive amount of pro-Trump iconography created by users of 4Chan and Reddit during the 2016 US presidential elections. Social media has also been used to solicit international intervention by other states. In early 2023, the “Free the Leopards” social campaign was launched to put pressure on the German government due to their delay in sending tanks to the war zones in Ukraine. This type of event, later known as memetic warfare, has become a serious issue in mass strategic communications due to its unpredictable and subtle way of action: in an article published by the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in 2016, an interview with Charles C. Johnson, the most famous right wing internet troll, made evident how important the role of social networks is in international matters - Johnson himself declared that “the best way to counter ISIS is to unleash an army of trolls on them” and underlined how the main problem still is “the lack of appreciation for social media as a battle space and the extent to which memetic warfare is already taking place”.

Some of the most recent examples of the use of memes in international matters can be seen in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The use of memes in the conflict has been immense - the official account of Ukraine posted a meme about the difficulties of bordering with Russia some months before the official invasion - and strongly contributed to increased global awareness of the turmoil in the country. What’s peculiar about the events experienced in Ukraine is the massive engagement in social media of both private and, most importantly, official state accounts. The official Twitter profiles of Ukraine and its Ministry of Defence posted memes about the commonalities between Hitler and Putin, memes about freedom of the press and human rights threats in Russia, and even AI-generated Harry Potter characters portrayed as soldiers fighting in the conflict.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, despite being a tragedy, probably represents the first milestone in a new way of waging war, and it highlights how social media will become increasingly influential in the next few years. From bitter criticism of policies to effective online warfares on forums, it is impossible to deny that the information accessibility and conveyance can nowadays be used as a strong weapon that can be potentially used by both private and public actors: the boundaries between citizenships and their political classes, which were not clear even before the advent of social media, became even blurrier thanks to the new and more accessible platforms and made it easier for private citizens to become effectively influential in steering public opinion towards a certain end. However, it’s a double-edged sword: how difficult will it become to distinguish between verified and unverified information? To whom do we trust with being that distinguisher? If it's still possible to draw a divisive line between virtual and real life, how will we limit its impact over real-life issues?

The questions we ask are still more than the answers we give. For the moment the most effective solution is not to hamper access to social media platforms in an arbitrary way, which would only stir up hatred and incentivize their incorrect use, but to promote responsible use of social media and educate people to keep a balance between the blurring lines of reality and manipulation.

With the melodramatic saga of the Titan submarine going to curtains, it's time to take stock of everything that’s happened, and look at some of the possible ramifications of the doomed voyage’s untimely end. Foremost on the mind of many is the ballooning cost of the international rescue operation that went on for days even after the U.S. Navy informed the Coast Guard it had evidence the sub imploded midway through its voyage to visit the Titanic wreckage. Should millions of dollars in cost be absorbed by the government when those onboard the submarine willingly paid OceanGate to descend more than 2 miles below the murky depths in an uncertified and openly experimental vessel? Will this incident put a damper on the burgeoning luxury adventure tourism industry - such as VirginGalactic’s suborbital trips that just started launching at the end of June? And finally, what can we make of the public reaction to the soap opera that surrounded the search efforts - in particular, the vast quantity of memes and other social media content that turned the tragedy into entertainment and often seemed to relish in the demise of those onboard.

The five members on the fateful journey were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Action Aviation Chairman Hamish Harding, one of Pakistan’s richest business moguls Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, as well as Paul-Henri Nargeolet who made much of his fortune retrieving and selling thousands of artifacts from the very same storied wreckage. Although it is difficult to get verifiable estimations of the late crew’s net worth, the collective value is definitively in excess of $1 billion (if not a few times over). If nothing else, each ticket on the Titan was reportedly sold for $250,000 dollars - demonstrating a minimum level of exorbitance. This monetary extravagance may have been a major catalyst for the public excoriation that started before families even knew the fate of their loved ones, and continued thereafter.

The overflow of schadenfreude - joy from the suffering of others, especially in the tearing down of one’s perceived social superiors - has been intense. From almost the onset of public coverage of the rescue, memes were deriding everything from the use of a logitech control to pilot the sub, ziploc bags for toilets, to simple gallows humor about the Titanic taking the lives of more rich people over a century after its original sinking.

There are a couple of explanations for the vitriolic online reaction to the Titan tragedy. As psychologist Pamela B. Rutledge explains, “people also like to see wealthy people get pulled off their pedestals. When rich and privileged people run into trouble or behave badly and get caught, we feel better because it shows that underneath it all, they are normal and mortal, cracking the veneer of privilege. It makes us feel less inferior.” She further elaborates that “Social media…remove[s] accountability. The posts you see are milking the Titan tragedy and reflect personal attention-seeking… Attention is a form of power. Getting views makes people feel special and important and, with enough followers, can even generate income. There is no incentive to be reasonable or empathetic. Social media creates a reward-based system that encourages the outrageous and extreme.”

Additionally, these already skewed incentive structures for content creation were dialed up to 11 by a brewing discontent with the ultra wealthy among the entire American populace - a frustration that is brimming among the prime demographic of social media users. A whopping 50% of 18-29 year old Americans hold a distinctly negative view of billionaires and believe that they are a bad thing for the country. People in the United States, especially young ones, are becoming increasingly reactive to the exponentially growing wealth disparity in the country.

Yotam Ophir, head of the Media Effects, Misinformation and Extremism (MEME) lab at the University of Buffalo suggested taking the excesses of social media mockery with a grain of salt. "We are all performing online, right? We often have kind of different personalities that we project," he said. "Just the fact that somebody clicked on share or retweeted a joke about the incident, I wouldn't infer from it that they are really truly happy about somebody else's tragedy. I think they find that there's the kind of opportunity to maybe perform their social identity, and part of their social identity is often resisting, again, the deep inequalities in wealth." Nonetheless, these grievances are based on real world issues that are only getting worse, not better.

Looking forward, the public response to this incident may serve as a bellwether for unresolved and rising economic divisions. That is not to say the masses are ready to eat the rich, but the building resentment certainly has already been a force at play in recent domestic politics. All one needs to look at is the outsider politics and anti-establishmentism that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 and his famous slogan “drain the swamp”. If nothing else, public discontent with economic inequality has already manifested itself in domestic politics, and remains an unresolved if not further exacerbated issue.

However, it was perhaps the store bought parts, Macgyvered solutions, and Titan’s completely experimental design that played the largest role in driving public mockery. The simplest thought experiment that leads me to this conclusion involves the recently inaugurated VirginGalactic space plane. If the VSS Unity rocket plane were to erupt into a fireball on its 20th launch, carrying with it Richard Bransson (VirginGalactic’s founder), other space entrepreneurs and a 19 year old boy, I highly doubt the public reaction would be nearly as unempathetic and derisive. For some, there is an element of “what did you expect?” when hearing about the complete disregard for industry standards and the lack of any certification whatsoever. This feeling only intensified when the public became aware of lawsuits from 2018 claiming OceanGate ignored major safety concerns raised by the engineer they hired to conduct a safety review - before ultimately firing him for raising those concerns in an internal report. And all (or should I say “none”) of this for a ship intended to dive more than two miles below the surface of the ocean.

What’s more, at a depth of 12,500 feet, the force of water crushing the submarine was approximately 6,500 pounds per square inch (psi). Conversely, the most intense dynamic pressure experienced by a rocket during launch (known as Max-Q) is only 4.7 psi above normal atmospheric pressure, and once in space the habitat only needs to withstand an outward pressure of 14.7 psi. Even though there are multiple orders of magnitude in difference between the pressure related stress experienced by the Titan versus any vessel used for space tourism, craft like SpaceX’s Starship, or those of Blue Origin and VirginGalactic have been in rigorous development for decades in contrast with the Titan’s unregulated and rushed development timeline.

Despite the deluge of online theories, armchair materials science experts, and criticisms of the Titan’s non-spherical design, the most plausible explanation I have encountered came from Alfred McLaren, a retired Navy submarine captain who has spent more than half a decade underwater. According to him, It wasn’t the carbon fiber or the plexiglass that failed individually. It was the use of three different materials in one system: carbon fiber, titanium, and plexiglass. He points out that “they have different coefficients of expansion and compression… You make repeated cycles in depth, of course you’re gonna work that seal [between pieces of the hull] loose." In a separate interview with The New York Times McLaren explained that “At that depth, you could have a leak that’s not much bigger than a diameter of one of your hairs and you would be dead within a fraction of a second… They really wouldn’t have even known they would have died, they would have been dead before they knew it.”

As summarized by reporter David Pogue who joined OceanGate for a dive in 2022, “I should not have been reassured by the Titan’s 20 successful dives to the seafloor. I should have been terrified. Each dive brought the sub closer to destruction.” However, he concludes that “Rush was [not] a con man. He genuinely believed in his design — enough to trust it with his own life many times over.” Unfortunately, faith cannot compensate for flawed engineering. Yet, consumer faith will ultimately be a factor in the success of other emerging forms of luxury adventure tourism related to deep sea or orbital exploration.

That being said, any chilling effects on the industry are likely to be muted by a number of factors. The simplest being that many of the very individuals capable of booking $450,000 flights on VirginGalactic, or multimillion dollar flights with SpaceX are motivated by thrill seeking agendas, which may only enhance the excitement and psychological reward of partaking in such perceived risky activities. Point and case - Hamish Harding was already in the Guinness Book of World Records for other adventure and exploration related endeavors before he joined the Titan for its final descent.

The second leading factor is that most of the tickets sold for space tourists are for future trips that will occur after hundreds of other launches occur, providing observable reassurance for passengers and separation from the June incident to reduce their worries. VirginGalactic has an apparent waitlist of 800 people as of a month ago, and the passenger of Starship’s second commercial voyage around the moon, Dennis Tito, said he expects SpaceX will complete “hundreds of Starship flights before he and [his wife] Akiko fly.” Since retiring, he said, he’s been “looking for something to do. I’ve been following SpaceX almost on a daily basis, watching YouTube for the last 5 years, and I could see that there was an opportunity,” Tito said. Moreover, the rigorous standards of engineering and regulation that go into aerospace products provides a level of assurance against accidents that is absent in an unlicensed and uncertified submarine operating in international waters with no regulatory body in sight.

As for the various agencies and international organizations that participated in the rescue search, the eventual bill will certainly extend into the millions of dollars, and has already been pegged at $1.2 million by a variety of sources. Many people expressed a frustration with footing the costs for extravagantly wealthy people who willingly went to the bottom of the ocean in an experimental vessel. While many of the participants in the search may seek and ultimately find reimbursements for their efforts, there is one organization that is legally prohibited from seeking coverage of financial costs involved in a rescue operation - the U.S. Coast Guard - and it was probably the actor responsible for the largest portion of the bill. Bound by federal law, the Coast guard, and by extension the American public will be the ones to catch the tab.

Thanks to the ephemeral attention span of American media, it is hard to predict whether the Titan tragedy will be remembered in the collective conscience or swept away by the tides of the 24 hour news cycle. Perhaps criticisms of the (arguably minor) cost of the search will be used as a political cudgel, and on the international stage there may even become greater regulation in the submarine industry. However, it is unlikely that any lessons learned from this event, or changes in policy will recognize or attempt to resolve the economic inequality and divisions that drove a subsect of the public to outrage and ridicule.

Winston Churchill once remarked about Russia that it is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Such a description may be befitting of the mutiny by elements within the Wagner Company led by Yevgeny Prigozhin against the Russian government. When news of it broke, various analysts boldly said that Russia was “sliding into what can only be described as a civil war” and predicted the doom of President Vladimir Putin. The revolt was, however, relatively bloodless and disbanded after barely 24 hours had elapsed with Priogzhin withdrawing from his march to Moscow and accepting exile in Belarus in exchange for Russia agreeing to withdraw criminal charges for the incitement of armed rebellion. This article will explore various interpretations surrounding the affair by looking into a few general theories about what happened and the evidence for and against them. These theories can be divided into two schools of thought: that Prigozhin earnestly led a coup attempt against Moscow - with or without foreign backing - while the second is that Prigozhin’s coup attempt was on some level an elaborately staged maskirovka operation.

A basic background to the mutiny is necessary before one explores speculative theories about the march to Moscow itself. On Friday June 23rd, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the face behind the Wagner Group, accused the Russian military command of carrying out strikes on the private military company’s encampments that killed a “huge” number of their soldiery. The 62-year-old Russian private military leader had long been a very vocal critic of the way in which the Russian high command ran the Russo-Ukrainian War and often argued that the top military brass was incompetent. In that spirit, Prigozhin let loose a tirade over how “the evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped.” The response from Moscow was to levy criminal charges against the chief of Wagner on the grounds that he was “inciting an armed uprising”.

Prigozhin then began his march with only elements of Wagner supporting him to Rostov and thence unto Moscow demanding that the military leadership be changed and insisting that this “is not a coup d’etat. It’s a march of justice. Our actions do not impede [regular Russian] soldiers at all.” Despite calls from Russian military and political leadership for the Wagner soldiers to stop their advance, Priogzhin and company continued. Prigozhin also defied the warnings of President Putin about the consequences of military rebellion and the penalty for its plotters. Prigozhin, in command of a very vulnerable armed column with no outside support, met curiously little resistance on the road to Moscow. He only briefly encountered a few Russian aircraft that were shot down and 19 pilots were killed. (Confirmation of the death of the pilots was later admitted by the Kremlin.) These constitute the only known deaths during the entire march toward the capital. Then as suddenly as the mutiny began, it ended anticlimactically. Late Saturday Prigozhin halted his advance on the capital, agreed to go into exile in Belarus and those Wagnerites who refused to partake in the mutiny would be offered direct contracts by the Russian Ministry of Defense in exchange for criminal proceedings of armed mutiny against Prigozhin by the state to be dropped. The affair was thus settled relatively bloodlessly with terms hostile to Prigozhin.

A simple reading of events would be that Prigozhin harbored honest disagreements over how the war ought to be waged and/or delusions of his own omnicompetence fresh from his military group’s difficult but much praised triumph during the Battle of Bakhmut one month before. After being informed that the Russian Ministry of Defense was planning to disband his beloved Wagner company by the end of June, he went stir-crazy and by mid-June started to plot to take over the Russian state or at least rid it of those in the military apparatus that he considered to be slowing down the war effort against Ukraine. There is then the inciting incident involving the death of many Wagnerite soldiers by the bombardments by the Russian military that Prigozhin latches on to it to set off his plan to shake up the Russian state. After organizing the uprising, Prigozhin realized that the game was over when no other institutional or military force defected to his cause, and struck an unfavorable deal with Putin.

There are problems with this simple reading. Elements of it may be true but incomplete and there are reasons that indicate not all here is what it appears to be. Take for instance Prigozhin’s claim over the inciting incident that sparked his mutiny, that the Russian command bombarded his troops and killed a huge number of them. A video was even released purportedly showing the aftermath of this attack. Yet, the video contained no solid evidence of anything of the sort according to one analyst:

[T]he video which was released (purporting to show the aftermath of this “missile strike”) did not show an impact crater, debris, or any wounded or killed Wagner personnel. The “damage” from the missile consisted of two campfires burning in a trench - apparently Russia missiles that can start small controlled fires without destroying the surrounding plant life? [In his view] [t]he video obviously did not show the aftermath of a missile attack…

Perhaps then Prigozhin’s inciting incident was a false justification to launch his mutiny. It must then be said that Prigozhin, a man with no military command experience, is no stranger to being an agent of disinformation during the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War itself. During the battle of Bakhmut itself, there is evidence to suggest that he repeatedly feigned weakness to try to bait the Ukrainian army to further commit to attack his force. He frequently complained about a lack of ammunition and at one point on May 5th stated to the world that Wagner would be abruptly pulling out of the city within days. Wagner continued to make advances in the war-torn city and stayed put until after the entire city fell to Russian hands weeks later. Prigozhin also loudly predicted that Russian frontlines may not withstand a Ukrainian spring/summer offensive and that a breakthrough may be inevitable. So far the month-long Ukrainian summer offensive has underperformed expectations and has not (as of the writing of this article) made it beyond the first screening lines of the front at a high human cost to Ukraine in an already bloody war. The point being here is that one ought not to blindly take Prigozhin at his word and that there is reason to believe that he is a disinformation agent.

The timing of the mutiny was at an unfavorable time politically that hampered its chances of success. When compared to successful Russian revolutions like the 1917 October Revolution, the underlying elements that created the typical conditions for a successful seizure of power were not there. Russia found itself in 1917 facing a myriad of problems. Back then there were major economic as well as military shortages, military morale and public confidence in fighting World War One was low after the failed Kerensky offensive, and the government’s legitimacy was in serious question. Modern Russia does not have the degree of these problems that the old Russian Republic had. The Russian economy is now widely seen as having weathered Western sanctions and the Russian public has basic and growing confidence in their economic future. It is also acknowledged now that Russia is not running out of missiles or other munitions necessary to sustain the war effort. Far from running out of ammo, the Russians appear to be ramping up military production and maintaining a greater rate of key metrics of firepower on the battlefield than the Ukrainians can.

The military situation before Prigozhin made his move for Russia was one of high morale as Ukraine's much touted offensive encountered serious Russian resistance. The pronounced problems present led the Swedish military analyst Mikael Valtersson to pronounce the offensive “a failure” and that the Ukrainians were trading minimal territorial gains for high casualties on their side. Finally, President Putin enjoys a high degree of long-standing approval from the Russian public who, broadly speaking, trust his decision-making when it comes to matters of war and peace in Ukraine. In effect, the Russian head of state had political and institutional legitimacy (if demonstrated by nothing else than the reaction by the political and military elite to Prigozhin’s mutiny). That at least was the situation in the buildup to Prigozhin’s attempt to seize power.

Given all these factors and the fact that Wagner is completely dependent on the Russian state to provide logistics and munitions for their military company, are there alternative explanations to why Proghizin elected to do what he did? One school of thought posits that some of this was an attempt by foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA to conduct regime change in Russia. What circumstantial evidence would point toward such a theory? President Joe Biden blurted out during the beginning of the war that Putin cannot remain in power indicating that on some level there is appetite for removing Putin. The reports that American intelligence knew about and was able to get “an extremely detailed and accurate picture” of the planning of the Wagnerite uprising since mid-June would suggest that they have sources embedded in or near Prigozhin’s circle. Similarly, the United States was tipped off and expected that the power struggle between Putin and Prigozhin would have produced “a lot more bloodshed” and that a fierce battle over Moscow would be waged. Might the Americans or foreign actors have played a more intimate role in the mutiny? There was the odd story that Prigozhin offered to render intelligence for foreign agencies that came out in the Discord leak of Pentagon Papers. (Prigozhin denied doing so.) Might then Prigozhin have flipped toward working with a foreign intelligence agency? Could this explain why the United States delayed introducing new sanctions against Wagner during the coup given a desire to destabilize Russia? Perhaps so, but this theory would not explain how Prigozhin was able to get off so easily in the aftermath of his mutiny or why he would accept exile in Belarus, a Russian ally, as opposed to in the West or in a neutral third party.

It would also be difficult to explain why in the days after the mutiny, Putin met with Prigozhin, a man he labeled a traitor, to reportedly offer the man employment opportunities. If the coup outed Prigozhin as a traitor and as a possible foreign intelligence agent, why do this? The Russians are also rather lax about actually ensuring Prigozhin remains in exile. Again only days after the mutiny, the president of Belarus remarked that Prigozhin was not in his country and that he is back in Russia. The Kremlin’s spokesperson when pressed on the matter responded that, “No, we don't track his [Prigozhin’s] movements…[w]e have neither the means, nor the desire to do so.” This is an odd response to a person who tried to overthrow the state and if Russia knows that said person collaborated with foreign intelligence services then it is a doubly odd answer.

Might there be another interpretation of events that would better fit in with the facts of the case? There is the theory that this whole affair on some level was a form of maskirovka, a controlled way of deception meant to out foreign intelligence operators and potential elements within Russia that would be sympathetic to regime change. Where might be some evidence of this? The same Discord leaks revealed the claim that there was an extensive network of spies in Russia and such an operation might allow Russian counterintelligence to unmask this network. The Wagner Group was, after all, founded by individuals with extensive ties to the Russian military and intelligence community. The main headquarters of the private military company is located in a base that shares space with a GRU (Russia's foreign military intelligence agency) unit and the two entities have collaborated in the past. American intelligence also believes that Putin was informed about what Prigozhin was plotting at least a day before the mutiny erupted. This theory would explain the unusually lax security in Rostov, the supposed headquarters of the Russian operation in Ukraine, and on the road to Moscow despite such conveys being targets for artillery and aerial bombardment. Then there is the unusual media coverage of the mutiny by state-owned media within Russia. It might also explain why Prigozhin ostensibly went to Rostov based on false intelligence that the Russian Defense Minister was once there to direct the inciting strikes against Wagner. All of this might have been a ruse to make the situation appear serious to see who would back Prigozhin and possibly what counterintelligence Prigozhin could gather from them.

There are arguments against the theory of a stage-managed coup. One would be that the risks of such an operation outweigh potential rewards. As one commentator on the affair wrote “[t]here was widespread confusion which does nothing good for morale, and operations in the Southern Military District were disrupted by Wagner’s occupation of Rostov.” Appearances of instability would also damage Russia’s image in the eyes of foreign powers - friends and foes alike, the former who might have second thoughts about supporting and investing in Russia. Furthermore, the mutiny did result in fatalities albeit not many in the grand scheme of things.

Counterpoints exist to all three arguments. The first is that the timing of the operation was at a period of high morale so as to diminish the chances of an actual threat to the regime. The second counterpoint would be that foreign ties may be assuaged with time. Finally, such a deception operation might have not been perfectly executed and as such unintended fighting and losses did take place. Russian history is littered with examples of authorized and unauthorized political action being taken and led by state informants. In 1905, Father Gapon, a secret police informant, led a peaceful pro-Czarist march to the Czar’s palace in Saint Petersburg to gain the ear of the Russian emperor. This march turned into a bloody Sunday massacre and was the inciting incident for the 1905 Revolution. The blood that was spilled during the Prigozhin affair may similarly not have been the intent of the plot.

It is important to reemphasize that elements of all interpretations may be accurate here on some level. For instance, Prigozhin or some of those involved in the Wagner uprising might have acted the role of a double agent with the aim of unmasking foreign intelligence contacts and their genuine collaborators. If there is one thing that is relatively certain about this whole affair it is that at the present time, Prigozhin’s leave has granted the military command a reprieve from his rants. Perhaps in a matryoshka doll-like fashion this mirky riddle within a mystery inside an enigma will never be fully unveiled.

Although the 2024 Presidential general election is still more than a year away, campaigning for the Republican presidential primary is already underway. Late next month, candidates who have received at least 40,000 individual donations to their campaign will be eligible to participate in the first primary debate. Much like the 2016 and 2020 primaries, the contenders will be defined by their opposition or support for former president Donald Trump. Trump has already cast doubt on his attendance for the first primary debate, citing his large lead and his belief that he would be dealing with a “hostile network”. Still, if Trump follows through on skipping the primary debates, it would be an interesting and perplexing shift in campaign strategy for a candidate who surged to victory in the 2016 primaries through the consistent media coverage that his campaign attracted. Although much of the negative coverage of Donald Trump was critically slanted, the increased media attention given to “the Donald” gave him an increased reach for recruiting potential supporters to his cause.

Trump's bellicose and condescending attitude towards his competition in the upcoming primary contest has been backed up by polling in recent months. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the candidate who has the best chance of beating him in the primaries, was trailing (as of July 15th) by close to 30% (Trump 50%-DeSantis 20.5%), according to 538 - the polling aggregate and ranking website. 2023 has been a disastrous year for DeSantis, who once led Trump in some polls as recently as December of 2022. A close look at the above-mentioned polling website 538 shows that since March of this year, support for DeSantis has never topped 30% and has even routinely dipped below 20% since mid-May. Despite the recent downturn for the Governor’s campaign and Trump’s huge lead in polling, DeSantis’ chances of winning the Republican nomination are greater than any of his fellow candidates not named Trump. His ongoing public feud with Disney over an educational bill that was enacted in 2022 (Often referred to by his critics as the “Don't Say Gay” law), brought widespread media coverage and demonstrated his dedication to fighting for conservative values. DeSantis showed his determination by passing the law, even if it meant taking on a multinational corporation as powerful as Disney, that is set to invest 17 billion dollars into Florida in the next decade. Now, he will face his next challenge, beating Donald Trump in the upcoming primaries. The success of his campaign will be determined by his ability to simultaneously woo voters from Trump’s camp and the centrist wing of the Republican party.

Former Vice President Mike Pence also faces this same challenge. Once a staunch defender of Trump’s policies, Pence was accused by Trump of refusing to overturn the election results, around the time of the January 6th Capitol Hill riots, souring their relationship. Earlier this year in March, Pence accused Trump of having “endangered my family” through his “reckless words” and defended his refusal to overturn the election results, saying he “had no right” to do so. Yet, Pence may be too closely associated with the Trump administration to effectively distance himself from his former running mate. It is interesting that the peak support for Pence this year was on January 6th (with 11.6% Republicans backing him), though support for his candidacy in polls this year has rarely exceeded 10%. For his campaign to have any chance of posing a plausible challenge to Trump, he will need further regression in support for DeSantis and improve on his appeal to evangelical voters, who are currently the largest religious voting bloc in the US. He will also need to defend his participation in the Trump White House without further alienating Trump’s voters and demonstrate that his brand of conservative and religious values is not too extreme for centrist Republicans. Barring this herculean effort, it appears unlikely he will be able to establish himself as a serious contender for the nomination.

During the 2016 Republican party presidential primaries, there was a significant minority of the GOP (An acronym for “Grand Old Party'', a nickname for the Republican Party) voting base that was often referred to as “Never Trumpers”. These centrist and typically neoconservative Republicans were determined in their opposition to Trump’s candidacy and preferred to vote in the 2016 primaries for any of the Republican candidates, aside from Trump. Although the vast majority of Republicans voted for Trump in the 2016 general elections, a sizable segment of conservatives only backed him because their alternative was to vote for Hillary. Once again, a number of candidates will compete to win the support of this centrist sect of the Republican party. One interesting contender is Vivek Ramaswamy, a relatively unknown (compared to his fellow candidates) figure in politics until his Presidential run this year. Ramaswamy’s CV is the epitome of an American success story. The son of Indian immigrants, he received degrees from Harvard and Yale, and has achieved an impressive record of business success, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $630 million. In March, his campaign was receiving poll averages of less than 1%, but since then his campaign has steadily improved its showing in the polls, with support for his candidacy now receiving polling averages of 6.8% (as of July 30th, 2023), and he is currently garnering more support in the polls then anyone not named Trump or DeSantis.

Aside from Ramaswamy, there are two other candidates that have a viable chance to tap into the neoconservative faction within the GOP. Ever since she resigned from her post as ambassador to the UN during the Trump administration, many political analysts suspected Nikki Haley would run for president in 2024. During her tenure as Governor of South Carolina, Haley gained large-scale media coverage for her decision to take down the long standing confederate flag hanging in the grounds of the state’s legislature. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley’s career has been a story of impressive trailblazing. She was South Carolina's first female governor and the first Indian-American to serve in a presidential cabinet. Since she announced her candidacy, support for her in the polls has fluctuated from a minimum of greater than 3% to a maximum of nearly 10%. Her campaign has struggled to sustain any momentum this year in polling, so Haley will need to increase her support base during the debates in order to have a fighting chance in 2024. Like Haley, Senator Tim Scott, is also a rising star in the GOP hailing from “the Palmetto State” (the nickname for South Carolina). So far, Senator Scott has failed to achieve much support for his candidacy according to polling, at times support for his campaign has even been below 1%. He faces an uphill battle in the coming months to convince donors and voters that he has a plausible chance, when the dust settles, to be the party’s standard bearer.

On January 15th of next year, Republicans will officially inaugurate the primary contest when Iowa hosts the first of the fifty presidential caucuses. For there to be any chance that the Republican party will nominate another candidate besides Trump, several things will need to happen. First, there will need to be a candidate that can effectively convince Republicans that they have a more viable chance than Trump of achieving victory in a head-to-head matchup against President Joe Biden. One way they can advocate for this idea is by pointing to the results of the 2020 presidential elections and Trump’s poor showing with independents. In the 2016 elections, Trump received slightly more of the independent vote against Clinton (Trump 43%-Clinton 42%). The 2020 elections were a different story for Trump’s performance with independent voters, losing by a margin of 9% (Biden 52%-Trump 43%).

Trump’s rivals will need to be able to make an effective case that Trump cannot win in 2024 if they want to siphon off support from his voter base and wrest away his control of the party. They will likely point to the difficulties of nominating a candidate with looming legal battles and a tendency towards incendiary rhetoric. Still, barring an unforeseen collapse of Trump’s campaign, it would appear he is well on his way to securing the Republican nomination for 2024. While a lot can happen before the primaries start in January, based on the polling to-date, it seems very likely that Trump will be the nominee. There is still time left for other candidates to convince the Republican Party that nominating Trump again would be a mistake. So as the primary contest begins in earnest, observers should expect to see an escalation in rhetoric between Trump and everybody else. However, when the dust settles, expect Trump to be the next GOP nominee for President.