By Mark Episkopos, Managing Editor, Center for Military Modernization
Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed among the ten passengers who died in a fatal plane crash on Wednesday, according to the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency. “An investigation has been launched into the crash of the Embraer aircraft, which occurred tonight in the Tver region,” the agency said in a statement. “According to the list of passengers, among them is the name and surname of Yevgeny Prigozhin.”
Prigozhin led a short-lived Wagner mutiny against top Russian military officials in June, seizing control of Russian Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and marching on Moscow before abandoning his mutiny attempt as part of a deal hastily brokered by Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko.
It has been widely presumed– though not confirmed– that Prigozhin was assassinated at the direction of top Kremlin officials up to and including Russian president Vladimir Putin, who previously described the events of the June mutiny as “treason.”
Prior to the Wednesday plane crash, there were two competing schools of thought on Prigozhin’s fate. The first argued that Putin, in his own words, does not forgive betrayal and, given enough time, the perpetrators of the Prigozhin mutiny will prove no exception. The second camp envisioned Putin less as a Stalinesque figure and more as a pragmatic autocrat who is willing to overlook disloyalty if doing so yields concrete benefits in the short to medium-term. According to this line of reasoning, the Kremlin grudgingly acknowledged that Prigozhin– and, by extension, Wagner– is indispensable to Russia’s growing presence in Africa and could play a key role in later stages of the Ukraine invasion. Put another way, Putin calculated that Prigozhin, despite his disloyalty, is more useful to him alive than dead.
The “pragmatism” thesis appeared to win out in the months following the June mutiny. Prigozhin, supposedly exiled to Belarus and granted immunity from prosecution in Russia as part of the Lukashenko-mediated deal between him and Putin, was spotted in St. Petersburg at the end of July. Not only was he clearly not trying to hide, but the photo he took with an African dignitary at Trezzini Palace Hotel not far from the city center suggested he was there on official business. He filmed a promotional video of himself, uploaded by Russian military bloggers earlier this week, standing with a rifle in an African desert. “Justice and happiness for the African peoples,” he said, clad in camouflage, with a truck in the background. “Let’s make it a nightmare for ISIS, al-Qaeda and other thugs. We are hiring real bogatyrs [ancient Slavic warriors] and continue to fulfill the tasks that were set before us and that we promised we would handle.” There was every reason to believe that Putin intended to honor the June amnesty arrangement and, indeed, that Prigozhin and Wagner were poised to continue playing a vital role in Russian military operations across the world.
Then came the dismissal of Gen. Sergey Surovikin, commander of Russia’s overall war effort in Ukraine. Russian outlets reported on Tuesday that Surovikin, who has not been publicly seen since the day of the mutiny, was relieved of his post and replaced by Colonel-General Viktor Afzalov as head of the Russian Aerospace Forces. Surovikin’s sacking is the latest and most significant instance in what appears to be a series of purges against Russian military officers and officials thought to be too close to Wagner. It is difficult not to draw a link between the high-profile firing and Prigozhin’s death, yet the whole affair raises more questions than answers. If Putin was set on getting rid of Prigozhin, why go through the motions of agreeing to an amnesty deal he never intended to honor? Why incur the reputational costs of being seen as going soft on the mutineers back in June, thus inevitably inviting perceptions of weakness, only to possibly sign off on Prigozhin’s assassination a mere two months later?
Putin may have concluded that the Russian military and intelligence apparatus can administer Prigozhin’s African business without him and perhaps without Wagner, or least without those parts of Wagner that have remained loyal to Prigozhin in the mutiny’s aftermath. The Wagner group rose to a place of prominence– on the battlefield as well as in Russian political culture– following the stark failures of Russian forces in the Ukraine invasion’s opening stages. They cemented a reputation during the siege of Bakhmut for taking up tasks that the regular Russian military cannot or does not want to do. This dynamic produced tensions between Prigozhin and many top Russian officials, captured in a series of expletive-laden clips that showed Prigozhin admonishing Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov for slow-walking deliveries of munitions to Wagner fighters in Bakhmut. The Ukraine war has since developed in a substantially different direction. If the Kremlin believes it has successfully stabilized the front amid Ukraine’s plodding counteroffensive, then it may have concluded it has no further need of mercenary forces to shore up its war effort and, thus, is no longer obliged to tolerate Prigozhin’s erratic, insubordinate behavior.
Wagner, conceived in the mid 2010’s as a simple military tool to advance Russian state interests abroad, became its own political brand at home following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin became increasingly bold in his criticisms of top officials and in articulating policy views starkly at odds with official Kremlin stances. Though there remains no evidence that he was ever interested in threatening Putin’s personal hold on power, his ill-fated crusade against top Defense Ministry officials may have been a bridge too far in the context of a Russian political system that values loyalty above all. Whatever his underlying political ambitions were, he overplayed his hand and was possibly made to pay the ultimate price.
These considerations provide overarching context for why the Kremlin could want Prigozhin out of the picture, but they don’t explain the timing or sequence of events from the June mutiny to the Wednesday plane crash. Putin may want others to know he doesn’t forgive betrayal, but he has also sought to cultivate the image of a leader who keeps his word. If Putin has reneged on the immunity guarantee extended by him to Prigozhin in June, that would invite tangible credibility costs. We can reasonably speculate that competing factions inside the Kremlin had different ideas on how to handle Prigozhin, but the decision to greenlight Wednesday’s events– if that is indeed what happened, and we must be clear that we still don’t have all the facts– would have had to come from the man at the top. Beyond Prigozhin’s fate, it remains to be seen what the Wednesday plane crash means for Wagner as an organization, how those potential decisions could affect Russia’s ability to project hybrid military power overseas, and whether or not this week’s events turn out to be part
of an even broader Kremlin effort to retrench and consolidate its domestic authority eighteen months into the Ukraine invasion.
Mark Episkopos is the new Managing Editor of the Center for Military Modernization. Episkopos is a journalist, researcher, and analyst writing on national security and international relations issues. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in history at American University.
