Seemingly as soon as it began, the "Wagner Coup" in Russia has come to an end. Shortly after taking control of the city of Rostov-on-Don and turning towards Moscow, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin announced he was backing down in a deal brokered by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. (Prigozhin's safe transfer to Belarus has reportedly been "guaranteed" by Putin. Good luck with that).
But as brief as it was, things move quickly in the fast-paced ecosystem of the antisemitic conspiracy theory world (maybe why we had a two-fer today!). So in the short window when Wagner was on the march, we got some oh-so-typical content from sources close to the Kremlin:
The head of Russia's state-run television network RT said Saturday there was "no doubt" that the ongoing uprising by the Wagner mercenary group against the Kremlin was orchestrated by the secret services of the US, Britain and "perhaps one Mideastern country," a clear reference to Israel.
RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan is notorious for trafficking in baseless conspiracies and spreading false information at the behest of the Kremlin.
The "irony" is that Israel, of course, has been among the more tepid supporters of Ukraine compared to most of the western world, and thus seems quite unlikely to wade into the fray by supporting regime change in Russia. But plausibility was never the antisemite's strong suit.
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Prigozhin is reportedly of some Jewish ancestry on his father's side (as is his stepfather as well), but he's (as far as I know) isn't connected to the Jewish community or Israel. The other big macher of the Wagner Group, Dmitry Utkin, the man called "Wagner" within the group, and who named the group, is an avowed neo-Nazi, and chose the name Wagner after Richard Wagner (the German composer, not the Canadian Supreme Court Justice) for the latter's connection with antisemitism and the Nazis' affinity for him.
Of course, these are strange bedfellows of a sort, but we ARE talking about literal mercenaries here.
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