What was that about?

The person on Twitter who seems to have the best command of the situation has been Dmitri Alperovitch. He has been noting all along the low level of violence, which suggested to him that neither Prigozhin nor Putin meant what he said. Yesterday he tweeted:

We might very well see Moscow make a deal with Prigozhin - perhaps give him more power and say in how the war is being conducted.

They clearly don’t want to fight him and he has now made his point and also lowering the aggressiveness of his tone.

A deal, he thought, might be in the offing:

And there is precedent in modern Russia for such deals. Kadyrov (and his dad) were originally on the side of the rebels in the Second Chechen War (and had killed a lot of Russian soldiers) but then were convinced to switch sides and all was forgiven.

He says the "march on Moscow"

should be viewed through the lense of what in Russia is called ‘razborki’ - gangland warfare. . . .

Sometimes it ends in death and leadership changes and sometimes in sitdowns where both sides shake hands and agree to move on (at least for a bit).

Alperovitch retweeted this from James Palmer:

One of the things familiar from criminal confrontations is also that you can have very big violent talk followed by promises of brotherhood and unity very close to each other. the problem is usually that's for a closed circle, not the whole public.

Palmer offered the below as a past example of someone ramping up the threat of violence to make a point (you'll probably have to click on it to read):

What a bizarre country.

One thing to note is that this seems to have had little impact on the war.