Telegraph Propaganda: Kilner and Kemp's Co-ordinated Clown Show
Two zero-evidence hacks tell you what to think
Certainty that ages like milk
Within hours of the start of Prigozhin’s rebellion/uprising/coup attempt, the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper was straight out with “analysis” by James Kilner that was disturbingly certain. If we break down the article, what is there to be certain about?
The article was published at 08:56 and edited at least once 12 hours later. The changes only serve to bolster some claims or tone. The modified headline becomes more certain (see screenshots below):
The following are excerpts of Kilner’s claims distilled into the opinion he wants you to adopt.
For Vladimir Putin, this is the end of the road… he will be permanently damaged and his Kremlin days are numbered. Putin’s aura of invincibility and control will now be shattered… the rebellion, as well as Putin’s pleading address to Russians for their support, has made him look weak. Millions of Russians… will instead see a damaged and failed man… Formerly obsequious Russian officials… will now look to others… If Russian soldiers are fighting Russian mercenaries in Russia, his leadership will be permanently compromised… the Kremlin will be worried. Its forces have been decimated and are demoralised after 16 months of war in Ukraine.
Note: the entire article contains only one instance of the word because and zero instances of why.
Kilner does literally nothing to explain or justify the above opinion. He simply asserts it with zero evidence or backing. He also writes about the Russian people as though he can speak for 150m people and knows what they think and feel about an event over the course of twelve hours. There is zero doubt or wonder from Kilner, despite the coup having utterly failed on the same day.
Amongst this opinion, Kilner wants you to just believe that any and all coups in Russia or the USSR are the same and go the same way. To prove this he tells you: Gorbachev survived a coup then lost power five months later; Yeltsin survived a coup but later turned to and gave in to drink. Kilner actually thinks that these events are accurately summarised in two sentences and are both certain predictors of what will happen this time around. This is literally infantile stuff.
Locked up in a villa in Crimea, Mikhail Gorbachev sat out a coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991 but his power ebbed away and within five months he had lost his position as Soviet leader… Two years later, Boris Yeltsin turned his tanks on the Russian parliament after they tried to dislodge him from power. It worked and shored up his presidency but the chaos that his coup unleashed ate up Yeltsin, who turned to drink. By New Year’s Eve 1999/2000, bloated and in ill health, he had given up after a chaotic six years as president and quit in favour of Putin.
Kilner’s amendments even served to undermine and contradict his own claims about the coup in a bizarre way:
In any case, it is shocking to see Wagner fighters patrolling the streets of Rostov-on-Don, the southern city seized by Prigozhin, sipping coffees and lounging on benches.
So, Kilner wants you to believe that in the coup that ends Putin, the people engaged in the coup were “sipping coffees and lounging on benches”. He also claims that Wagner “seized” the entire city of Rostov-on-Don. This did not happen. What does it take to seize a city? More than sitting on benches and drinking coffee.
If you’re as industrious as Kilner, seizing a nation’s minds can be done in one day. On June 24th, Kilner apparently penned 6 articles for a single edition.
Follow-up
The next day, the Telegraph employed the same approach with a different by-line. This time, Richard Kemp was rolled out to deliver a Putin hit piece that didn’t cite a single piece of evidence for any of his claims about what was seized, shot, killed, or engaged. Kemp would have us believe that he is inside Putin’s head and every political operative in and around the Duma (excerpts):
Putin’s downfall is only delayed. It’s coming
Prigozhin’s abortive coup d’etat has now… exposed the regime’s weakness and the vulnerability of the country’s internal security. Prigozhin seize[d]… Moscow’s command centre for the entire Ukraine war without a shot being fired. His heavily armed mercenaries could then advance hundreds of miles towards Moscow, largely unmolested, and with reports of Russian soldiers surrendering in their path. On the way to Moscow, Wagner forces reportedly shot down seven helicopters and a transport plane – if true, one of the deadliest days for the Russian air force since the war in Ukraine began.
The Kremlin lacked forces to secure even key targets inside Russia. They had to depend on another private militia, Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechens, who apparently sent 3,000 men from Ukraine to confront Wagner. Moscow’s critical vulnerability will not be fixed without withdrawing already stretched forces from the front line.
Russian forces are unable to respond to unexpected crises without orders from above… That those stop orders were not forthcoming exposes Putin’s weakness. His desperation to avoid violent clashes between Russian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries led to paralysis in the Kremlin accompanied by a frantic search for a way to shut Prigozhin down without bloodshed, eventually pressing Belarus’s Lukashenko into action. It’s not likely Putin cared about casualties on either side, but he did care about the potential disintegration at the front line caused by violent insurrection on the streets of Moscow or the roads leading to it. His address to the nation comparing this uprising to the collapse at the front in 1917 revealed his inner fears.
Putin brought all this upon himself… by his ill-judged invasion and… by his Machiavellian divide-and-rule policy that allowed the convicted criminal Prigozhin to build a powerful private army.
Putin’s ill-judgment can surely only be explained by the psychological toll of an unwinnable war taken on a man hitherto thought of by many as a political and strategic genius.
That aura has now vanished. Along with it, the reputation of an iron leader who cannot be crossed has gone, as he pardons the Wagner insurrectionists and, for the time being at least, allows their humiliated leader to scurry off into exile in Belarus.
The many Kremlin watchers who until now believed Putin was beyond any internal challenge have been proved wrong. Prigozhin’s actions have exposed Putin as a mere mortal. The Moscow elites… are now watching a regime falling to pieces. Calculations of self-preservation will have taken over from fear and respect for an infallible leader who brought them stability. Some have been hedging their bets with their own private armies.
A successful Ukrainian counter-offensive, that may have greater chances as a result of the turmoil inside Russia, could edge us closer to Putin’s downfall, which in turn might lead to the collapse of the Russian army.
Neither Kemp nor Kilner quote a single source offering any perspective or opinion on how Putin might be viewed by either the source or others.
According to Kilner, Putin is over, but the examples he cites could mean Putin’s got 6 months to two years. But Kilner hasn’t got the guts to say when or how Putin’s end will actually come about. As for Kemp, it’s even more vague.
The obvious truth is that Putin will not hold office forever. One take is that he tried to groom Medvedev as his successor but reverted when Medvedev showed himself to be an Atlanticist, and he may still be. By the Telegraph’s thinking, the departure of Putin, no matter when, where or how that happens, will prove Kilner and Kemp “prescient” because they have done nothing more that spin meaningless, unbacked and even self-contradictory stories. Kemp and his editors missed this obvious contradiction:
His desperation to avoid violent clashes between Russian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries led to paralysis in the Kremlin accompanied by a frantic search for a way to shut Prigozhin down without bloodshed, eventually pressing Belarus’s Lukashenko into action. It’s not likely Putin cared about casualties on either side, but he did care about the potential disintegration at the front line caused by violent insurrection on the streets of Moscow or the roads leading to it. His address to the nation comparing this uprising to the collapse at the front in 1917 revealed his inner fears.
Kemp asserts that he knows what Putin thinks and cares about. In essence, Kemp states Putin is weak and done for because:
he found a way to resolve the situation avoiding the need for any violence;
he stopped Prigozhin without bloodshed and by using the support of a political ally, thereby delegating the task to someone else;
he doesn’t want violence between Russian citizens only because it will upset frontline troops.
This is literal gibberish on logic grounds alone. The less skill or power or intelligence one has, the more likely one is to resort to violence. But Kemp implies that Putin is weak because he didn’t use violence to forcibly put down a coup. So, if Putin had put down Prigozhin with 50,000 Praetorians and nailed 1,000 Wagner heads to the wall, what would Kemp and Kilner have said? They would have said, “Putin’s panicked insanity and murderous brutality proves he is done for and is a criminal.”
If one reads the comments of either story, one will see that a majority seem to just echo the author’s sentiments. A minority call out the guff. A likely approach is that 77th Brigade and The Telegraph team log in and fake many of the supportive, parroting comments. There’s literally no reason to believe that they are real. If they are, what it shows is the those readers have no objective ability to parse an article, judge it and set it against one’s own biases and dispositions.
To be fair to Kemp, he penned an article in May discussing possible political issues that Russian PMCs may present to the power structure:
Following Bakhmut, Prigozhin’s militia is now pulling back from the front line to its bases across Russia. That leaves a large group of armed, battle-hardened men, including many convicted criminals, at their leader’s command and poised for the fray.
Alongside – or opposed to them – are many others, not just the private military companies and regional battalions, but also the plethora of armed organs of the government, including the FSB, GRU and Defence Ministry. Then there is the army itself, whose ranks include large numbers of abused, humiliated and disaffected soldiers, commanders and even generals. If Putin cannot repel the growing threats to his own homeland and at the same time secure some kind of victory in Ukraine, it is possible to envisage the Russian establishment falling apart into a violent mêlée of opposing armed camps.
On the surface and in hindsight, Kemp seems to have a point. But what he doesn’t do is try to account for external influences. Nor does he detail any reasons why beyond “if the war is lost and lots of troops are pissed off, there could be several groups vying for power.” Well, there could be. But if America is anything to go by, a lot of the “abused, humiliated and disaffected soldiers, commanders and even generals” would likely start committing suicide to the tune of 6,000 per year, against a backdrop of 40,000 total adult suicides.
What Kemp also ignores is that some of what is happening to Wagner is about the Kremlin reabsorbing it back into the national military, which Prigozhin opposed. This is a non-violent means to contain and control the PMC entity. Kemp should acknowledge that seeing as it is a key part of the coup resolution - Wagner troops who did not take part in the coup can still take a MoD contract. But never mind key details, Putin IS DONE.
This is evidence of how great the Telegraph is. It can literally tell you EXACTLY what to think about an event in a completely different nation without any sources or evidence, within a couple of hours of an event there taking place.
Please feel free to suggest a time frame over which we should back test the Telegraph’s commands to your brain.
‘Tankies’ - The Rupert and Tarquin brigade as we used to call them in the City. Normally in fund management or the investment trust business after their stint in the army…