Quote Originally Posted by mojo
Re Prigozhyn is alive... sure... but for how long? Putin's political rivals have a habit of falling out of windows or drinking the wrong tea... sometimes months after they thought they were beyond his reach.
Most of Putin's political rivals don't have a private army the size of a small city. But your point about air superiority is right on the money. I was going to make the same point in response to poop's post but you beat me to it.

And while I can understand why isolated border cities can be easily seized without a timely response from Russia, here we're talking about panic in the capital. You would think Moscow is the hardest city in Russia to seize, that Putin would hold back enough reserves to at least protect his capital. But he instead told people not to go to work and maybe even fled to St Petersburg, something he denied doing but his plane was apparently tracked making the journey.

Don't get me wrong, if Putin gets the chance to defenestrate Prigozhyn it'll happen, but that might be a little more challenging than some random rich guy with a team of bodyguards.

Russian leaderships tends to revolve around at least the plausible appearance of being run with an iron fist.
This is an important point too. It's exposed Russia's iron fist as all bark and no bite. It's hard for him to explain to the Russian population how he didn't at least try to eliminate this mercenary group as they apparently advanced.

Prigozhyn has since claimed he wasn't marching on Moscow, but this seems like an obvious PR move to ease the pressure on Putin, possibly part of any deal that might or might not have happened.

It's such a strange story. It wouldn't surprise me if we were talking about some failed country where the government have no proper control, but this is Russia, supposedly a global superpower to challenge USA. Can you imagine this happening in USA? What do you suppose happens to a private army marching on Washington? They're not going to successfully flee to Mexico, on that I would bet real money on.