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.
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> 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.
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> 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.