There's no way everyone in the free world saw this coming and Prigozhin did not. I'm still scratching my head about what he thought his endgame was going to be after the coup.
He was going to lose control of Wagner if the coup didn't succeed, whether or not he tried. So no surprise he made that attempt. You don't get to where he did in life without being bold, taking risks, and being lucky. And it's likely that at the point where he had already committed himself to the coup, it looked more likely to succeed than it does now with the benefit of hindsight.
As for why he kept hanging around Russia... where else is he going to go? He was a wanted man everywhere. Wanted by both the civilized world, and Russia. There are no good options in that circumstance.
But again, we are talking about a literal mafia boss. He probably was dumb enough to think he had actual leverage.
I think there is a lot more to this story than what has come to light. I suspect they were threatening to kill his family and had the means to do so.
What makes you think a mafia boss would be smart? Their defining features are ruthlessness and brutality, not intelligence or "street smarts". Putin for example is known for bombing civilian apartment buildings to get into power and very publicly poisoning traitors with polonium and nerve agents, not to mention entering a disastrous war and tanking the Russian economy.
Those upper echelons are only there as an accident of history. They were in the right place and the right time to loot the Russian state during privatization while killing, imprisoning, and controlling all their opposition.
That seems like an awfully bold assertion. Mafia bosses have a different set of rules than most of us, but to think they survive by repeatedly flipping a coin and being lucky is preposterous.
Those that flipped tails are dead or in prison.
A route in Hague was a guaranteed lifetime sentence, while playing some role in the elites gave some low-probable possibilities.
From some of the post-coup reporting (Washington Post?), there were comments from the US intel community that the coup had much wider support past Wagner, but was set to launch several days later.
Russian intelligence caught wind of it... and decision was made to launch it prematurely.
Granted, the US intel community is far from an unbiased party, but it would explain Prigozhin's calculus is a more believable way.
And oligarchs being upset at Putin for upsetting the business-as-usual applecart for no good reason isn't unreasonable.
It isn't a contradiction for smart people to fuck up and do dumb things. Sometimes people just miscalculate and make mistakes.
Through the use of power and connections, some people manage to fix their mistakes and synchophants start claiming it was "4D chess" all along.
Really they just screw up like everyone else, but their resources often allow them to recover.
When they screw up big enough, you're left with "how did they not see it coming" "paradoxical" situations like this.
Remaining in Bahmut = sure death
Leaving Bahmut = disobeying orders, judged by desertion. He had executed desertors before and had a very public speech than desertors deserve to die and will be executed. result: jail (and death) or death.
Coup = Free card out of the Bahmut tomb, and maybe live for one couple months more as long as he don't try to return to Moscow.
A todo Prigozhin le llega su San Martin I suppose. Africa can breathe with relief today.
See Mark Galeotti's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Galeotti ) writings. I can't find where he discusses this in his podcast, but https://www.patreon.com/posts/prigozhins-plot-86895135
> When it comes down to it, Prigozhin was not trying to supplant Putin so much as petition him. This formulation was suggested by Anatoly Pinsky in a very interesting article in the War on the Rocks (https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/prigozhin-as-petitioner-ma...). It was disruptive, it may even have seemed dangerous, but the perverse irony is that it came from a place of a kind of loyalty. Prigozhin was not in any way, questioning Putin‘s right to rule; he was simply trying to influence his policies. In the quasi-mediaeval political environment of Putin‘s court, this is not necessarily personal disloyalty. Putin was clearly viscerally angry when he recorded his first message on the Saturday morning. He may also have been scared. But as he came to realise what was going on, he seems to have become less personally affronted. In other words, he not only came to understand what Prigozhin was doing, he excepted in a way, the fundamental systemic legitimacy of what he was doing.
>
> We do not have to start speculating about compromising material, or that Putin still fears Prigozhin, and his maybe 15,000 - although the figure is likely to be is rather smaller - Wagner fighters. Rather that Putin acknowledges Prigozhin was engaging in the sharp-elbowed politics that he himself has encouraged. After all, we have seen Igor Sechin set up a minister and get him imprisoned, Kadyrov repeatedly blackmail the federal centre for money, and security agencies frame, detain and possibly even defenestrate officers of their rivals. Horizontal conflict is at the heart of Putin's system.
>
> Of course, Prigozhin overreached. He needed to be punished, he needed to lose the opportunity to repeat this exercise, and he needed demonstratively to be banished from the blessed confines of Putin's circle (not that he was ever that close to the personage in reality). However, so long as he’s useful and so long as Putin accepts that he is true to the fundamentals of today’s neo-mediaeval Russian politics, then there may be a place for Prigozhin after all.
So not only was this a huge miscalculation nationally that deeply embarrassed Putin, Wagner was supposed to look independent. So beseeching Putin for help only made it worse.
The irony is that Prigozhin probably thought he had leverage, but the only real thing of value to Moscow about Wagner's sad little army was the independence.
The cause of this dispute, however, was the Russian MoD (Shoigu and Gerasimov) had decided that all Wagner employees operating in Ukraine and Russia were going to become part of the regular Russian military. Before Prigozhin's ersatz mutiny. see eg
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-military-trying-to-ta...
Thus there was no remaining pretense of independence, at least wrt Wagner forces operating in Ukraine.
I also don't think it embarrassed Putin, or at least not in the manner that (I suspect) you think. Putin's role is to intermediate disputes between the various competing boyars beneath him. He had let the Shoigu + Gerasimov vs Progozhin dispute fester instead of picking a winner. Hence Progozhin's march. The embarrassment stems from not fulfilling the role that only Putin can play in their political system (ie the final determination of disputes from the various independent actors operating underneath him, including both formal state agencies and oligarchs/informal agencies.)
Also, Prigozhin's post-march endgame was obvious: he continues to operate Wagner in Ukraine, and -- if possible -- removes Shoigu + Gerasimov. With an eye to developing his own independent power base in Russia, which Prigozhin didn't previously have.
Ukraine might blow it up though.
There's no way Prigozhin thought Putin didn't understand what was going on. The narrative of "If the honorable <leader> knew how bad things were down here, he would surely fix it" as if the leader hasn't seen the videos we all have seen is stupid, a lie, and was the same lie fed to peons in the Wehrmacht at the end of the second world war when they were starving in their trenches during the desperation of the liberation of Europe.
The honorable leader blah blah petition has occurred throughout Russian history, particularly under the Tsar and even persisting into the Soviet era.
Nevertheless, Putin was clearly not swayed.