Putin sat down with Wagner boss five days AFTER the mutiny

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. The Kremlin has adopted the strategy of Alice in Wonderland. You can never quite believe what you see or hear. Like the Mad Hatter, Putin held a tea party, or the equivalent, for 35 people after the mutiny masterminded by Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Wagner boss you will remember was exiled to Belarus after his march on Moscow with his troops last month. Oh no he wasn't. There was no ban, no exile, no dispatching to anywhere. In fact the main person at the tea party, apart from Putin, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR foreign intelligence agency, and Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard, was Prigozhin himself. It was all a very chatty and pass-the-biscuits affair. No one got shot or sent to stand in the corner. Prigozhin said his piece about not being very happy about the way the war in Ukraine was going and the incompetence of the Russian generals in charge and then off he went to his pad in St Petersburg and is still there as far as anyone knows. So has Putin gone totally soft or are there some Alice in Wonderland mirrors playing tricks? Putin's dour spokesman has confirmed the meeting took place. So what on earth is going on? My view is that Putin realised very quickly that he couldn't risk having Prigozhin as an enemy. He either had to be bumped off and smartly or brought back into the Kremlin fold. Thus the Mad Hatter's tea party. Bizarre but kind of very KGB, and Prigozhin will know for absolutely sure, because the SVR chief will have whispered it into his ear, that if he so much as steps one centimetre out of line in the future, his days, along with his wealth and his fancy pads, will be numbered.