Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Prigozhin's Rebellion. Anarchy in Russia." video.

in my opinion, the decision to quit the coup attempt must have been made mostly on the basis of immediate gains for prigozhin, something that's not a promise (like for protection or retention of assets) that could later be broken. such options I can think of are limited to: a) physical transfer of a very large amount of money/gold/gems - this may have been much smaller than what would be necessary to compensate for prigozhin's presumed losses in assets associated with giving up, including wagner's international ressource extraction, but it would be on a similar order of magnitude, billions of dollars, in order to have considerable appeal to prigozhin. b) physical transfer of weaponry - it would hold some definitive value, but I'm inclined to discount this as extremely unlikely. besides being dangerous to putin, it would also be of unreliable benefit to prigozhin, given his very shaky prospects of continued command of a significant portion of wagner forces c) release of hostages, family members of prigozhin or other essential coup leaders captured by putin loyalists - to me, this is likely to be the main reason, though it probably would have been combined with a money transfer. wagner would have made efforts to secure potential hostages, but for operational secrecy, they may have been largely limited to escorting people to safe houses inside russia at the beginning of the uprising instead of getting everybody out of russia days earlier, and this could easily have failed to prevent somebody's capture (through successful government surveillance, or through disloyalty of the personnel tasked with the protection, who could theoretically have been able to extract a fortune from putin as a reward). if the pictures that supposedly show prigozhin's own go-bags containing false passports and tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold supposedly picked up from the saint petersburg wagner headquarters' parking lot are real, that would indicate coup preparation partially shambolic enough to likely involve a partial failure to secure potential hostages, even prigozhin's own family. I don't know where they live or where they were, but he has three children and a wife who owns (owned) a bunch of businesses in saint petersburg, like he does. I would be somewhat surprised if those were inside russia, but it's also not entirely out of the question that putin's people managed to take hostages outside of russia. keeping strong surveillance on family members as leverage would have been an obvious thing to do before this attempt, so hiding them might have been very tricky. I also believe with high confidence that the reported involvement of belarus and lukashenka is a mere misdirection effort. lukashenka had no authority whatsoever to negotiate here - even if he did talk to prigozhin, he would have been putin's messenger, so acknowledging him as an actor in this is nonsense. he has substantial agency in many other matters, but not in regards to a russian coup attempt. lukashenka was inserted into the narrative in order to soften the impression of putin reversing course about everything he vowed to do a few hours earlier. the deal wasn't made with lukashenka, it was made with putin. lukashenka is just a stand-in to do something that putin didn't want attributed to himself.
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@laszlozoltan5021 I see it as extremely unlikely that NATO would respond with nukes to russia nuking ukraine. in my opinion the maximum response would include NATO aerial bombardment of russia, the medium response would be a NATO no-fly-zone or no-libya-zone over ukraine, and the minimum reaction would be dramatic increases in sanctions amd weapons deliveries, probably including a substantial implementation of punitive actions against countries not participating in sanctions against russia. NATO combat ground forces in ukraine are possible with the medium and maximum response, but seem unlikely (mostly due to lack of public support for such actions). I would expect the very limited use of tactical nukes to produce the minimal response, extensive use of tactical nukes (causing several tens of thousands of deaths, not targeted to cause few deaths and mostly intimidate) to produce the medium response, and american-style use to produce the maximum response. but NATO is not interested in a nuclear exchange, and a NATO conventional force reaction would have good chances to not be answered with nuclear strikes against NATO, which would be the only thing that would initiate a nuclear exchange. though I do think that it's very possible for a NATO attack against russia to be answered by russian attacks, even invasion attempts, on NATO territory, those still would likely not result in a nuclear exchange, since NATO is in a much better position in a non-nuclear war than in a nuclear one. NATO is under no illusion that a wagner nuclear strike would somehow be less russia's doing than one conducted by the official military, that distinction has never been worth much. publicly redefining wagner as enemies of russia could have been used finally to give some credibility to the distinction even in the case of a nuclear strike, but for this to be the case, russia would have to report before the strike happened that wagner has captured nuclear weapons, since that's what they would do if it actually happened precisely to prepare to reject responsibility for their potential use by wagner.
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