You didn’t make it successfully, but your post started with “I wouldn’t bet on that”, in response to me saying that Prigozhin is a lesser evil (with regard to the risk of nuclear deployment) than Putin.
Your statement and my response were:
Nowhere in there did I say that “ Prigozhin is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons than Putin” or any words to that effect.
Stranger
I said that Prigozhin is less likely to deploy nukes than Putin.
You replied: “I wouldn’t bet on that”.
How in your mind does that translate into “Prigozhin is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons than Putin”?
Stranger
I don’t know, the author of that piece might be overreading how much power Prigozhin has and understating recent and public slights against the Wagner Group to put it in its place. He mentions Soledar but doesn’t really show how much the Wagner group was written out of the story. If Prigozhin is to be believed, Wagner did all the work and the Russian military took all the credit. That’s certainly how it reads in press releases from the Russian Ministry of Defense, it goes out of its way to spread credit for this ‘great victory’ in taking a small town to each and every possible branch of the Russian military but neglected to mention Wagner playing any role at all.
Putin’s division of power amongst subordinates and setting up departments that compete with each other to perform the same function and to prevent any single person amassing enough power to be a threat to his position at the top is a story as old as dictatorships. The author correctly notes that Wagner recruited convicts from Russian prisons extrajudicially but doesn’t note that the Wagner group itself is illegal under Russian law, which forbids private military corporations. This of course doesn’t prevent Wagner from existing and being a PMC, but provides a useful sword of Damocles constantly hanging over Wagner’s head should Putin decide Prigozhin has gotten too big for his britches and decides to shut down Wagner.
Long and pessimistic think piece here:
that sounds surprisingly like “the 5th Beatle” … in the same “superfluous” way … just ever-so-more stressing (by means of the Streisand-effect) that there were only 4 Beatles.