Whoa, what a weekend! We thought we might have a civil war on our hands, but instead it all came down to a big nothing burger. Let’s wrap up and look ahead. First, some evaluation:

Why did Prigozhin cut a deal?

Let me be honest – on Saturday, I definitely didn’t see the deal coming. I was beginning to think that we were looking at a ‘Kabul situation’ where the momentum for the advancing Wagner forces was so strong that everyone would bandwagon behind them and that they would storm into the capital. Why didn’t this happen

Well, I (and most others) misread Prigozhin’s intentions or determination. For me, the rhetorical ‘point of no return’ was when Prigozhin and Putin exchanged death threats, basically vowing to take each other out. I certainly didn’t expect that to end up in a negotiated solution 6-8 hours later, but I was proven wrong.

Clearly, Prigozhin simply wanted to save his life and his beloved Wagner PMC. He had no real plan of what would happen once his 25,000 strong corps would reach Moscow. Would they storm the Kremlin? Would they besiege the city? Would they arrest the army leadership? Would they hang Putin? I don’t think anyone in Wagner really had a plan for this. To let 25,000 war-weary rebels loose in a densely populated city was of course a recipe for complete disaster and mayhem. Perhaps that’s what brought Prigozhin to the table.

So to put it simply – things are more or less back to status quo in the short term for Russia. But in the long term, we are looking at a lot of different dynamics. Who are the winners and losers? Here’s my take:

The Winners: The US and Belarus