Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Mercs just want to be paid

There’s a lot of ink being spilled trying to make sense of what’s happened this week in Russia. Good luck to the pundits. 

My theory makes just as much sense as theirs. Once he heard his paycheck was really in the mail, he called the whole thing off.

In any case here’s what the pundits think:

Yaroslav Trofimov/Wall Street journal:

After Weekend of Chaos in Russia, Questions Remain Over Fate of Wagner

With both Putin and Prigozhin silent, Russians and Western officials wonder whether the crisis is truly over

“The entire system has lost yesterday, including Prigozhin, who is also part of the system,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who was in Moscow on Saturday. As for Putin, he added, “it turned out that the czar is not a real czar because he couldn’t control a man from his own system who’s supposed to be under his full control.”