GuerrillaSoldier posted... what's so difficult for you all to understand about prigo? should it be put in game lingo to make more sense?
putin hired mercenaries. these mercs, like any merc, care about money, their loyalty is weak, and their leader has a trait of being loud and rebellious. as the war continued, their loyalty/confidence got so low they basically went berserk and putin lost control of their movements and actions. the same way any chaotic hired unit can go berserk and you can lose control of them.
so putin had choices. either wipe out the chaotic unit, which is not good because it's a really strong unit that can be useful. conform the unit into your main army, but that would take special actions (threaten, payment) to achieve, which they ultimately did. or let them roam free, which is bad because they can easily destroy all of your bases and possibly also the enemy's.
so putin played the special action card. got the leader of the chaotic unit to separate himself from the actual useful 50k units. and now you have this special unit to move around at your will, with some complications of (for now) being attached to this loud and rebellious figure.
it wasn't planned. it was a unit that went out of control. but what russia proved was that it had the methods (blackmail, threats, things that would be considered illegal in most other countries) to stop it before it got out of hand. if there was any benefit, it was for ukraine. but hopefully absorbing the unit into the army didn't do anything bad for the ukrainian side in the future.
they aren't absorbing wagner into the army. they are offering contracts to the wagner troops that didn't participate in the insurrection, but that is the minority of them. the majority of wagner troops are following prigozhin to belarus.
https://www.politico.eu/article/yevegeny-prigozhin-wagner-group-russia-ukraine-war-mutiny/