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If Yevgeny Prigozhin’s story proves anything, it is that no one is indispensable
August 24, 2023 7:31 pm(Updated 7:42 pm)
It is hard to escape the feeling that Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had it coming. Business jets containing men who launch mutinies, if not technically against the Kremlin but against Russia’s top command, do not just fall out of the sky half an hour after take-off from Moscow.
There will most likely never be an adequate explanation for what brought that plane down even though in due course we will be delivered the results of a lengthy “investigation” into safety violations, pilot error and the rest. Russia’s turbo-patriots will blame traitors and Ukraine; the Kremlin will mostly likely not say very much and the people will nod and move on. This is rough justice, this is the way Russia works, they’ll think, and they’re right.
Prigozhin was the ultra-violent, ultra-nationalist arm of a ruthless and violent state. He could have been dealt with through the courts but someone, somewhere on high decided not to bother with due process. Sudden death sends a far stronger message to any among the elites who might dream of doing what Prigozhin did, that treachery will not be tolerated. President Putin famously declared that traitors would “kick the bucket”, and now, finally, two months after calling Prigozhin a traitor, that is exactly what has happened. Putin does not forgive. He does not forget. The state will win, one way or another. That is the message behind the image of that plane, tumbling in free-fall out of the sky.
Outside the building in Prigozhin’s home town of St Petersburg which up until a few weeks ago was known as the Wagner Centre, an IT hub set up by Prigozhin for all things defence, there was a steady trickle of mourners who came to lay flowers. One man had lost his son in the battle for Bakhmut, where Wagner fighters, most of them convicts, died in their tens of thousands for negligible strategic gain. He lamented Russia’s loss and said he wanted to pay tribute to Prigozhin and his deputy, Dmitry Utkin, as heroes of Russia. Another woman was inconsolable. She’d wanted Prigozhin to run the country, she said, sniffing into her handkerchief. She was a fan of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and had considered Prigozhin her only hope for a Russia free from corruption. “I always say ‘Joseph Vissarionovich, if not you then who?’” she sobbed, using Stalin’s patronymic. “All we have now is oligarchy”.
Prigozhin will not be honoured as a hero of Russia. Vladimir Putin has sent his condolences to his family and called him a “talented businessman”, a person with “a complicated background” who made “serious mistakes in his life but achieved the necessary results”. It is unlikely that he will go much further than that.
As for Utkin, Prigozhin’s deputy, he was a particularly unsavoury character whose neo-Nazi sympathies and appreciation for Hitler’s favourite composer were the reason why the Wagner mercenary group was called what it was. His selection of far-right tattoos may help with the identification process at the morgue.
Also believed to have been killed in the crash was Valery Chekalov, Wagner’s logistics and security chief. A risky business, to have all the Wagner top brass flying together and an indication, perhaps, that Prigozhin was not taking the threat to his safety seriously enough given the Kremlin’s apparent forgiveness in the aftermath of the coup. What a mistake that was.
The Kremlin’s default is to promote to its people a message of “business as usual” as it continues its war in Ukraine. It suggests there is “nothing to see here” as the security state goes about its business. That can lull people into a false sense of security. Prigozhin must have thought he was untouchable and that years of doing the Kremlin’s bidding in countries from Ukraine to Syria and across the African continent were enough of a counterbalance to his angry, social media tirades that he could get away with it. He had enjoyed free passage to move between Russia, Belarus and Africa even after the events in June, his private jet hopping across borders (according to Flightradar24) with hardly a care in the world. Until Wednesday night, that is, two months to the day since the mutiny.
Insight into what the elites are thinking, for Westerners these days, is largely guesswork. The Russian rich and powerful don’t give much away in this new, reactionary Russia and if they do, in public, it is to prove their loyalty to president and country. Russians since Soviet-times tend to speak openly only in their kitchens and the elite kitchen-invites are thin on the ground. But it is not hard to imagine that they must be watching their backs, recognising that if Yevgeny Prigozhin’s story proves anything, it is that no one is indispensable.
Diana Magnay is the Moscow correspondent for Sky News
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