I’ve been fascinated by Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s brief-and-aborted uprising in Russia, because it is nearly incomprehensible to me. I keep trying to map it onto American politics, but it just does not line up well at all. What if the CEO of Blackwater (now called “Constellis”, but come on, “Blackwater” is perfect in its ominousness) announced he and his mercenaries were marching on Washington, D.C. with the intention of removing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin? I think they’d be stopped and/or obliterated. It would most certainly not end with exile in Canada due to the interceding of Justin Trudeau.

After a decent amount of reading, the best I can figure is Prigozhin believed he had enough support to, at a minimum, take out the military leaders who were planning to disband and subsume the Wagner Group. He thus headed for Moscow, but when that support failed to materialize, he reversed course and took the least bad option available to him. That seems to make a certain kind of sense, even if it sounds foolhardy.

But if all that is true, why on earth did he come back to Russia to collect confiscated items?

“It’s not the end of Prigozhin,” the businessman said, speaking Wednesday on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They returned all his money to him. More than this, today they even gave back to him his honorary pistol, the Glock, and another weapon. He came to take it himself.”

That is a perplexing move, to say the least, not to mention seemingly extremely dangerous!

If both Prigozhin and Putin are alive and well when we ring in 2024, I will be very surprised but also exactly as confused by the whole thing as I am at present.