Sources of British special services have reported that the Russian secret services threatened to hurt the families of chiefs of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) before Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner and leader of the Wagner PMC, stopped his offensive on Moscow.
Everyone agrees that we are missing some key information that would explain this. I don’t know what it is any more than the rest, but we should bear in mind that the missing factor could be incompetence. Russia’s power structure is complex and delicately balanced. Putin has gone to great efforts to insure that no one knows everything. More than one of the players may have badly miscalculated, resulting in the current mess.