The Mutiny: Day 3

Prigozhin's and Putin's conflicting takes

Shortly after Prigozhin’s mutiny was over, Aleksey Arestovich — former advisor to Zelensky, life coach, ideologue, and prominent war commentator — was asked on a live stream, “What was that?”

He replied:

Fuck if I know. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it for two hours, and now I’m going to have to make fucking comments.

Similarly befuddled, I went over to the closest cannabis club in Barcelona¹ to think it all over. A big African man issued a member ID for me and suggested I try the Champagne Haze strain. His phone was playing an American news report on the mutiny.

After a toke, I started jotting down whatever came to my mind:

This day and the next were a peculiar time because, without a consensus on what happened — without even one popular, comprehensive, and reasonably compelling narrative to latch on to — people had to either come up with their own theories or disengage from the topic.

While the mutiny was still taking place, a friend who lives in Russia and has relatives in then-occupied Rostov told me he didn’t follow the events because he was “fucking tired of this whole soap opera” and expressed what I saw as a mixture of confusion and irritation at me being more engaged in the topic than him — after all, I’ve left the country more than a year ago, so what’s with this obsession with the local agenda?

Those who did share their thinking, often sounded baffled and darkly amused by the perceived absurdity of it all.