Must have made a hell of a deal.
so Wagner becomes part of the Russian Ministry of Defense, i guess.

That was pretty crazy, you don't take aim at the king and then just stand down, its all or nothing, or usually it is. Russia is just a crazy place. My only explanation I could think of is Prigozhin is either sick with cancer or some other disease and has weeks left, or is willing to martyr himself to try to stop this war or just smear Putin and write his own legacy as a folk hero. He has put Putin into a terrible position. That speech Putin gave was cringe, he even compared himself to Czar Nicholas, LOL! You could see the fear on his face. Prigozhin had to know he had landed a blow at that point.

Putin can hardly leave him alive now, but killing him will martyr him and could cause a popular uprising of the people. Either way Prigozhins legacy is set in many eyes as someone who stood up to corruption (no matter he is certainly part of it) and took action to prevent bloodshed at his own risk. However he dies, Putin will not profit from it. Putins legacy will now be as a lame duck from today until the day he is out of power, however that comes.

Putin is definitely weakened with this, but I seriously doubt that Prigozhin will necessarily be safe in Belarus. Putin has a history of dealing with his enemies rather harshly. I also don't think that there would be any real uprising of the Russian citizenry in the event of his death.

I'm not arguing he would be safe, Im saying he must have some reason not to care about being killed. His stunt was just to screw Putin no matter what happens to him. Maybe he though he might be killed anyway and this is just a way to ensure when it happens, he will have already humiliated Putin and set his own legacy as a better one.

Well, here's the problem.

trump is a Russian asset.

He has been a Russian asset since 1987.

Up until 2014, the Russians handled him very carefully. They used him covertly and sparingly, making little moves here, tiny moves there. He was deeply entrenched in the criminal world, but he also had a thick veneer of legitimacy and respectability, if you can believe that. The Russians treated him like saffron: a little goes a long way in achieving spectacular results.

But in 2014, Putin decided he wanted to use trump more directly, and started pushing on him in earnest. trump resisted for a while, but finally announced his candidacy for US president, and the GRU was forced to go along with it. It wasn't that hard to convince them, really? They'd been planning on this for a long time, and they figured now was the perfect time to do it. They had Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Digg and YouTube in their war chest of psyop dirty tricks, and they went full throttle.

And whaddaya know? It worked. It fucking worked!

But see, here's the thing about going full throttle? It's noisy. Very noisy. It's very noisy, and leaves a really huge mess behind you. Churned water/earth/air, spray, dust clouds, disruption, angry experts, pointing witnesses...

For example, did you know that on Twitter, you can load Tweets into your app, and then save them as a draft? You don't post it, you load it, then click "save", and it gets shuffled into the drafts folder. And you can load dozens and dozens of potential Tweets into the draft folder, all sitting there, waiting patiently to be posted with ** NO ** record of where the draft was composed. Keep that in mind.

So. Now they're waiting to be posted. Posted by you? The account holder?

Ostensibly, yes. But if you jusssst so happen to be a very important person, you can assign people as account managers. Those people can log in and make Tweets, like and retweet other Tweets. Or they can load your drafts folder with a few dozen "talking points" that serve your narrative. And isn't it just so handy and convenient that Twitter doesn't record where the drafts came from, it only records where the Tweet was posted from.

Ever wonder how trump managed to blart out so many Tweets, so fast, and so well composed, at 3AM? I mean, other than the cofeve, most of them were spot on. For him, anyway. Or rather, for whoever made the drafts. And sure enough, you look at the Tweet, and it says, "Posted at 0305 from The Whitehouse," just as it should. Even though the draft might have been spawned in the Kremlin.

Mind you, this is just the top layer of the croissant of treason, and it only gets worse as you reach the inside. And aside from a few layers that point to US senators, congresscritters, governors and dozens of supreme court justices, most of them all point back to Putin.

Putin was scared of the indictments. He was scared of trump actually being brought to jail and being held without bail until the trial in August. Because he knows trump very, very well, and he knows that the moment they tell trump to take off his suit and don the orange, it will FINALLY sink in that he's not going to slither his way out of this one, unless he starts gushing some SERIOUS intelligence.

Such as who's owned him for the last 40 years. Along with allllll the salacious details of who's compromised and who's flat-out owned. In congress. In the Senate. In the Supreme Courts. Goodness knows who else or where else. Joint Chiefs maybe?

So here's Putin, about to lose the goose that's been laying the golden eggs for the last fourty years. Unless he puts the pressure on *all* of his US assets, and forces them to delay, defer, discourage any investigations, he's going to lose EVERYTHING, and the entire world will turn against him. BRICS will become BICS, all of his deals with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Iraq, India, Egypt and Syria will fold, and he'll most likely be overthrown.

What could possibly distract Putin enough to stop putting all that pressure on his US assets? What sort of message could be sent to get him to back off? And what could possibly convince those US assets to stop taking orders from Putin and the Kremlin?

Hmm.

Hmmm.

HMMMMMMMMM.