The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches, the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Good morning. Before we turn to the Sunday culture edition of this newsletter, here are some of our writers’ most recent stories to help you make sense of the situation in Russia.
Why didn’t the Wagner coup succeed?
Prigozhin planned this.
The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.

I watch the winding creek.
There’s a body
knows how to catch light.Goes all gold
from tongue to inky tail.
One creek’s water spillsinto that of another
easy as a cottonmouth
twists round its mate.You ever seen them at it?
In spring,
lazy under oakshade.They come so close
you can’t tell which
is opening.There’s a love
that’s holy. All giving
and no take.

This article was originally published by High Country News.Around the middle of April, spring in the still chilly and wet Pacific Northwest seemed a long way off. Just two weeks later, though, Spokane hit a daily record of 84 degrees Fahrenheit; a month of historic heat ensued. During a heat wave that started around May 12, Portland’s metro area beat records for consecutive May days over 80 degrees (nine) and 90 degrees (four). Coastal communities set records in the 90s too.

Photographs by Venice GordonThe monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god.

In announcing the deal purportedly brokered by the Belarusian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, that Evgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership, would be permitted to “retire” to Belarus, in exchange for stopping his “March of Justice” to Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov explained that the deal, “was for the sake of a higher goal—to avoid bloodshed, to avoid internal confrontation, to avoid clash

A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023The Wagner Group, a mercenary force that is effectively an arm of the Putinist state, has been very good at meddling in the politics of countries other than Russia—and ensuring that its preferred regime either takes or stays in power.

Updated at 6:53 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023Russia is splintering. Even though Yevgeny Prigozhin just announced a surprising stand-down while en route to Moscow, it’s clear that his effort remains by far the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin since he took power in the summer of 1999. The story of the Wagner Group plot may not yet have reached its end, so it’s worth understanding how coups work: what causes them to succeed or, in this case, why they fizzle or fall short.

The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America.