Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
On Monday I sat with a senior White House official who said of the war in Ukraine—“Barring a major unexpected turn of events, there’s every reason to expect Putin will try to draw the war out until the U.S. 2024 elections to see if we have a change of leadership that works in his favor.”
The major unexpected turn of events took place on Friday.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin, once Vladimir Putin’s caterer the man whose Internet Research Agency was behind many of the Russia hacks during the 2016 election, led his notorious Wagner Group mercenaries out of Ukraine into Russia to begin an armed insurrection against the government of his former patron it changed the Eurasian strategic landscape overnight.