Yevgeny Prigozhin might have retired in peace some day. Or he could have been found writhing in the throes of Novichok, a nerve agent favored by Russia’s spy agencies. He might also have fallen out of a window, crashed in his car or slipped in his bathroom – like so many Russians lately.
As it happens, Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, a notorious Russian private army, appears to have died when a private plane crashed while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing him and the three pilots and six other passengers said to be on board.
That’s assuming that Prigozhin really was on board. His death has been proclaimed twice before, once in an African plane crash. Both times Prigozhin later turned up, professing surprise at reports of his own demise. What’s been said about the autocratic and repressive reign of President Vladimir Putin also applies to Russia generally, including Prigozhin’s Wagner Group: “Nothing is true, and everything is possible.”
We do know that Prigozhin’s assassination, if that’s what it was, would have made a chilling kind of sense. A big question mark has floated above his head since he led a short-lived mutiny two months ago against parts of Putin’s government.
At the time, Prigozhin, once nicknamed “Putin’s Chef” because he was so close to the big boss, professed that his uprising wasn’t aimed at the president personally. But he still made Putin look weak. With his KGB-trained mind and his avowed intolerance for betrayal, Putin was unlikely to just let this insubordination slip. He may have deemed some sort of vengeance necessary, if only to remind potential copycat mutineers of the rules in today’s Russia. When the attempted coup was over, Putin promised that the “traitors” would “inevitably be punished,” and “harshly.”
Everything from the style of the crash to its timing now resonates with the Putin regime’s macabre sort of rhyme and meter.
The first question is what Russians should think about the news of Prigozhin’s presumed death. Putin wouldn’t want them to interpret the hit as a sign that he’s worried, although some may come to exactly that conclusion. Instead, he’d want to signal to all of his potential adversaries that insubordination means punishment up to and including death.
That may not stop Prigozhin’s hardcore supporters or Russia’s ultranationalists, though, some of whom are now baying for revenge. If Prigozhin were yet to turn up alive, moreover, he’d immediately become an even greater threat to Putin than he ever was.
A different question is what will happen to the Wagner Group if Prigozhin is indeed dead. It’s long been one of the Kremlin’s preferred paramilitary armies, notorious for its brutal methods, on bloody display in places such as the Sahel, the arid belt across Africa just south of the Sahara. There, Prigozhin’s mercenaries have been hawking their war-waging services to any junta or dictator willing to pay – in diamond franchises or other currency. A positive side effect from Putin’s point of view is that these operations often drive out the French and Americans, draw in the Russians, and push more Africans to flee en masse toward the European Union that Putin so despises.
Without Prigozhin, however, the Wagner Group is in effect decapitated. One way to tell if Putin is sure that Prigozhin is dead will be if he names a new Wagner boss swiftly.
A third question is how foreign leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, nominally one of Putin’s few remaining allies, should think about the plane crash. A curious aspect of its timing is that it coincides with the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, where the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are meeting in a show of defiance to the U.S.-led West. Putin can’t attend this gathering in person, because the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against him for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children – a war crime.
Will Xi and the others interpret the hit against Prigozhin as a sign that Putin is still a fearsome tsar to be reckoned with? Or as a reminder that Putin cannot be a legitimate and reliable partner in their nascent geopolitical bloc?
Optimists should hope that countries such as South Africa and India, and others in the so-called Global South, now come closer to siding openly with the Ukrainians in their self-defense, and against Putin the aggressor, whose reputation for ruthless brutality will become ever more of a burden for anybody who associates with him.
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