Making sense of the recent events in Russia

The mutiny was as shocking as it was short-lived.

It will be easy for me to remember where I was on the day of the historic event that… never was. It was and wasn’t.

You know how it is: with big historic events, you remember where you were on that day. On September 11th, for example, I was in Moscow, enjoying the end of my summer break before heading back to England for the final year of university. On February 24th 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was in West Virginia, trying out a new consulting gig. I had fallen asleep early and woke up several hours later, like I often too. I looked at my phone and saw a message from my son: “Russia is bombing Ukraine.” Even now, a year and a half later, long after it all sank in, I’d call that message the most shocking I’d ever received. It was surreal.

I was taking an overnight flight from California to Florida on Friday, June 23rd, when the news of Prigozhin’s mutiny and advance toward Moscow started to dominate all major media outlets. I was getting an additional stream of updates from my four close Russian friends with whom I have a messaging group and a couple of Telegram channels covering Russia that I muted a long time ago but whose every message I was now reading greedily.

We were onto something big. Forget the pre-story of how Prigozhin and his Wagner group became powerful. Just think about the extraordinary and ridiculous nature of what was happening. A powerful and brutal war dude, who’s been directly…