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Notes -
All I can be confident of is that Prigozhin made a catastrophic political miscalculation. I'm not sure what that miscalculation was, people can delude themselves into all sorts of weird ideas about how things will play out. But this was surely not the outcome he wanted.
I don't think he could have possibly expected things to go better from a military standpoint - he encountered basically no resistance and had a clear run to Moscow.
Personally my best guess is that he expected Putin to side with him somehow. From where I'm sitting that seems like a crazy thing to expect, but he was always careful to avoid laying blame on Putin personally even in his most unhinged rants. He never declared a goal of overthrowing the regime, even though charging an army at the capital does carry a certain implication.
Also Putin was very slow to say anything publicly. I don't know what he was waiting for, but it's at least possible he was himself weighing the situation and deciding which way to jump.
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