...
I think I've got this cracked.
Oligarchs have been romancing the snot out of Prigozhin — and when you say "oligarchs" you are also implying Western influence — when they become oligarchs, they pretty swiftly lose their nationalist identities — because oligarchy means almost always a very global reach — and the Kremlin has known about it.
Faced with the fact of the leader of their very heroic warriors being the object of this romancing, and knowing the man as well as they obviously do, they have NOT been besmirching him in their media, not been reacting to his OUTRAGEOUS outbursts over the last couple months, preferring to let him hang himself and maybe even some of his wealthy lovers while keeping an EXTREMELY close eye on him... and them.
They let the people keep loving him AND had everyone in the pertinent section of Rostov on Don ready to greet him as a hero who could be talked out of violence against his countrymen, and then seen off as that hero who would not hurt his countrymen. Even though he did kill a few of them. Maybe even it was a sort of reverse-provocateuring job, people peppered into the crowd with the love bombing and open appeals for him not to start a civil war.
Even as we all know he never would have succeeded at such a thing — all the other towns between Rostov and Moscow were cutting big trenches into the roads leading from the highway into them — the people in place in Rostov on Don were hitting with both barrels straight into his biggest weakness. Adoration.
I hope there is an asylum in Belarus with some very grassy slopes and first rate security, because we cannot tell for 100% that his utterly outrageous outbursts were oligarch-induced or Kremlin-induced — regime change induced or traitor uncovering induced — but it was probably the former that the Kremlin turned into the latter.
Truly, this level of psychedelia is way more the hallmark of Western influence than Kremlin influence, and it might become even clearer in time, but I've known a few too many very high performance men with this level of ego weakness to really believe the Russians cooked up this much lunacy strictly to ferret out bad actors in their midst. They'd've already known them and not needed this idiocy, loss of life and loss of face on the world stage to accomplish it.
The one thing that might clear Prigozhin himself in this is if those oligarchs were sending into the Orchestra too many moles, and THOSE were the ones who needed to be weeded out of the ranks. THOSE would have been the ones who fired on and brought down their countrymen's aircraft.
Those will be the ones who are prosecuted and taken out of circulation, and the rest of the musicians are being absorbed into the regular military, but I think Prigozhin is done. In any case, he needs asylum, is at too much risk if he stays at large.
pipe up any time....
