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1 year agoHold up, it was originally supposed to be a trade show for journalists. It’s always been about the big corporations. They’ve always had a dominance over the event.
The problem was that E3 was seen by the public as something to desire access to, as being exclusive and so on. This drove the organising body to open it up to more general access. In doing so, the audience changed, so the content on display changed, and it became a shitty version of PAX.
And that’s what killed it, in turn.
Point three seems entirely noncredible to me. They were doing a thunder-run, by all appearances. That doesn’t just happen. You don’t accidentally cross the Rubicon, you don’t just happen to go “whoopsie, we’re in the Moscow Oblast, aren’t we goofy goobers!”.
And then the assertion: “However, I want to emphasize that image has always been a secondary concern for Putin.” Isn’t that just… objectively false? Image has always been huge for Putin. He presents himself as a strongman, a man able to lie to your face, but is so powerful that you, the Russian citizen, can do nothing about it.
I think Beau of the Fifth Column’s hot take is more likely – Wagner wanted out of the war for a host of reasons, they especially didn’t want to be taken control of by the MoD and essentially dissolved into the state apparatus. So Prigozhin decided to gun for Moscow in order to be able to force Putin’s hand and let Wagner return to Africa, doing the PMC stuff that Wagner has been running around doing for years. This has probably been something he’s been trying to negotiate for a year or so, but it all just came to a head with Bahkmut and the new contracts MoD was trying to push.