Russian invasion of Ukraine

I can’t see this being a Putin-orchestrated false-flag operation.

It was a reasonable question to raise in the early hours when information was sparse, but the way things played out argue strongly against it, you're right. I saw somewhere a suggestion that Progozhin thought (or was gambling) that Putin would side with him, that he saw himself as creating an opportunity for Putin to purge the establishment and reorganise Russia into whatever kind of nationalist ethnostate Prigozhin dreams of. Maybe and right now it sounds more likely than the Putin-in-control idea, but who knows?

Autocracies aren't meritocracies, particularly not ones run by paranoid bastards like Putin who regularly undermine and belittle their top generals and other administrators to keep them in check. They end up with a lot of people nominally in positions of power but scared to show initiative (or just lacking it), with madmen like Prigozhin and Kadyrov among the few capable of independent action. Which can explain why he did something so reckless and why he got as far as he did. For one thing, if Putin took a little time to decide how to deal with Prigozhin, nobody else was going to risk preempting that decision.