For 48 hours last weekend, the world stood transfixed with all eyes faced towards Russia as Vladimir Putin faced a serious challenge to his long rule as Russian President. Usually, when he is facing a challenge, someone from the FSB (Russian Intelligence) is dispatched to the relevant location where people have often met some very unfortunate endings. Who could forget the Salisbury poisoning of 2018? Who could forget the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning of the mid-2000s? There's been car bombs and an increasing number of people falling from high-rise buildings while the opposition leader Alexei Navalny is currently in prison.
All the examples outlined above are why last week's challenge and the strange response, or lack thereof has caught the eye of many.
Trying to explain what happened, how it happened, why it happened and what the point was...well, if the intelligence community can't do it, then an outsider who relies heavily on social media ain't got any hope whatsoever.
Piecing things together on social media, this is the best that can be made of the situation.
The Wagner Group are a Private Militia led by Yevgeny Prigozhin and he has been butting heads for months with the Russian military leadership, asking for more weapons and more supplies for the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Russian military leadership said no and then Prigozhin claimed that the military leadership had ordered a missile attack on the Wagner forces, killing quite a few. As implausible (but not impossible) as this seems, the constant butting of heads was enough and Prigozhin took his forces for a march back into Russia in the strangest mutiny of all time.
They seized the city of Rostov and the building that houses the military leadership, spending a brief period there gathering up supplies before they continued for a sudden march on Moscow.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, there was a lot of uncertainty. Some said Putin had fled, a spokesman said he was working at the Kremlin as usual. Then we had reports that some of the Russian oligarchs had gotten on their jets and fled along with parts of the Russian government. Moscow police and military secured the city with barriers and guns and curfewed the residents.
Then we had Putin in an emergency address label Prigozhin a traitor and urging members of the Wagner forces to arrest him and not do something they would regret. For the first time, we saw Putin at his most vulnerable but then what happened next, astonished everyone.
The Wagner forces that were on their way to Moscow and were a matter of hours out of the city suddenly stopped moving and turned around.
It was the most extraordinary thing. There was a military group staging a mutiny and then suddenly just like that, it had ended.
If the citizens of Moscow could express a view on social media summing up their feeling, it would be something like this
Why did it end though?
As to that, the most unlikely person has come out and claimed credit for negotiating the end of the mutiny.
Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the man they call Europe's Last Dictator.
Now look, let's be serious here for one second. Lukashenko is basically a puppet with Putin pulling the strings. For him to suddenly come out and claim credit for putting an end to the mutiny...it just doesn't ring true for me.
And what was the end result of this mutiny?
1) No charges! 2) Yevgeny Prigozhin was sent into exile at a military base in Belarus along with some Wagner fighters! 3) The rest of the Wagner forces who didn't want to head to Belarus were absorbed into the regular Russian military
4) Putin for the first time appears weaker than previously thought
So what exactly was the point of that 48 hours of mayhem where all eyes turned to Russia to see if Putin would be overthrown?
Not a damn clue and that's a fact!
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