It almost certainly wasn't a coup, nor was it intended to be. It was a boyar making a pilgrimage to Moscow to petition the king for help. Specifically, with Shoigu and Gerasimov's takeover of Wagner.
> 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.
Okay, but as high-minded as this prose is, it ignores a pretty crucial thing - the only reason Wagner existed in the first place was to give some amount of plausible deniability between Russia and their foreign policy interventions. So countries like Germany could have a legal precedent to trade with Russia so long as all of the war crimes were technically off of the books.
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.
Sure, Wagner being "independent" in Africa was helpful.
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
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.
>It was a boyar making a pilgrimage to Moscow to petition the king for help.
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.
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.