OPINION — Who can be surprised that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin met his timely end? Many have cited variations of the quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that if you try to kill the king, you better not miss. Another saying that comes to mind is that revenge is a dish best served cold. Or in this case, lukewarm.
It is possible that Russia’s version of an overworked and entirely ineffectual National Transportation Safety Board will conclude that the crash of Prigozhin’s plane was the result of poor maintenance, or that a corrupt ground crew watered the gasoline, or the pilot was drunk, or that western sanctions prevented updates to critical ground avoidance software.
Alternatively, Russia may claim that Prigozhin’s plane crash was caused by Ukrainian special services who infiltrated Russia, identified the plane and flight schedule, and surreptitiously planted explosives into long expired food tins intended to be served as a last grey and slightly rancid meal for Prigozhin and his hapless fellow travelers.
Or perhaps Prigozhin’s plane collided with one of the Moscow bound attack drones which have been flooding Russian airspace of late, or accidently got in the way of a Buk missile intended for a passenger airliner transiting Russian airspace. Alternatively, the FSB may have slathered a thick smear of novichok in the pilot’s flight skivvies.
Regardless of cause, the real reason for Prigozhin’s demise is that two months after his road trip of betrayal with friends and followers from Bakhmut to Rostov, he had lived just long enough for Putin to identify, interrogate, and isolate his supporters and co-conspirators.
Perhaps the previous day’s dismissal of Prigozhin’s confederate, Aerospace Forces Commander General Sergey Surovikin, is a coincidence, one of those funny accidents of timing. Coincidences happen often in Russia, particularly when it involves tragic early deaths of suddenly superfluous erstwhile Putin acolytes. In this case, is it surely a coincidence that Prigozhin and his entourage died in an airplane crash after having imposed the same fate on 12 Russian aviators who died trying to stop Prigozhin’s armored joy ride.
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Prigozhin’s death sends a signal familiar to Scorsese film fans. Don Vlad Putinoli is still large and in charge. That Prigozhin’s lieutenant Dimtry Utkin and other Wagnerites were also on board just adds a foot stomp. What now remains of the Wagner organization will be broken up, with any still useful combat or active measures components rebranded and repurposed. The rest will be fed into the western front woodchipper.
Is Putin weaker or stronger following this display of raw and vengeful power? A convincing argument can be made both ways. On one hand, Putin has decisively punished Prigozhin’s betrayal, eliminating him and his closest confederates. Further housecleaning will follow to ensure all margins of the cancerous growth have been removed. On the other hand, the mere fact of Prigozhin’s stunning challenge to Putin and the support he received means that there are fractures and divisions in Putin’s apparatus of power. The Prigozhin purge only addresses the most obvious cracks in the system. And in any event, Prigozhin’s stunning condemnation in of Russia’s justification for the war will live on. ‘What was the war for? The war was needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star….The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war….The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder.’
Perhaps the more significant question is whether the system Putin presides over is now more or less stable. In this regard, the so-called Power Vertical, the hierarchical structure of government power and patronage which Putin assiduously assembled over the last 20 plus years, may more closely resemble Jenga, the game in which a tower is built by overlapping layers of short sticks. As pieces in the middle and bottom are removed, the tower becomes increasingly unstable.
Putin’s catastrophic invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sidelining (retirement, firing, or murder) of key military and commercial members of the power apparatus represent the steady withdrawal of those sticks. Prigozhin is just the latest. It is possible that the structure may remain stable, but further erosion seems inevitable the longer the war lasts. Who knows when the result is sudden and catastrophic collapse.
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