Yevgeny Prigozhin: will ‘predictable’ death of Wagner chief backfire on Putin?

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a failed coup against Vladimir Putin two months ago, was on a plane that crashed in Russia, according to officials.

All 10 people on board were killed after the private aircraft came down near the village of Kuzhenkino, halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg.

The incident is “as predictable as it is chilling”, said ITV’s senior international correspondent John Irvine. It is Vladimir Putin’s “terrible revenge” on the Wagner chief, said the Daily Mail, while CNN said the episode was “the stuff of a second-rate thriller”.

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Russian authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the crash, amid “huge speculation”, said the BBC. But was Putin behind Prigozhin’s apparent death, and could it backfire on the Russian president?

What did the papers say?

“Of course it’s Putin,” a British security source told The Telegraph, because “all the mood music, all the habits, all the history” point to the involvement of the FSB intelligence agency, which “remains loyal to Putin”.

“Coup plotters rarely die of old age,” wrote Brian Klaas for The Atlantic. “And so Prigozhin has apparently gone down in his private plane” in what seems to be “a shot across the bow to other would-be plotters”.

“The biggest ripples will be those inside Russia,” said The Economist, because if Putin ordered Prigozhin to be killed, it would “reinforce the president’s image as a vengeful strongman willing to dispense with procedure and law”.

His enemies have suffered a range of “increasingly exotic methods of attack and assassination”, it added. These range “from a radioactive isotope slipped in tea to nerve agent smeared on door handles and underpants”, all designed to “cow would-be opponents”.

Yet while Prigozhin’s death “could help consolidate” Putin’s power, it could also “reinforce the myth of the Wagner leader as a truth-telling patriot”, and thereby “destabilise the pro-war constituency by alienating his followers and champions”.

What next?

In the “immediate future”, wrote Klaas, loyalists will “fear Putin more”, but “in the medium to long term, two fresh threats will likely emerge”. Senior loyalists in Russia’s regime “will now rightly wonder whether they could be next” and “some might contemplate whether they’d be better off living in a Russia without Putin”, making a “palace coup” more likely. Therefore “getting rid of Prigozhin just shifts and delays the threat”, he argued.

He said the assassination will also cause the “fear impulse” to go into “overdrive”, meaning “trusted advisers who used to speak honestly but cautiously soon start to bite their tongue or provide overly optimistic assessments”. This creates a “vicious cycle of bad information and bad decisions”. As a result “catastrophic miscalculations become more likely – and, eventually, one of them triggers the end of the regime”.

“Alive”, Prigozhin was “always a threat and a reminder that Putin is weak”, Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia programme and head of the Ukraine forum at Chatham House, told The Telegraph.

It “remains to be seen if Prigozhin’s supporters just swallow a bitter pill or further grow their ranks”, added Lutsevych, but either way “the conflict within security and defence agencies of Russia will only deepen, as Ukraine’s summer and fall offensive further degrades Russian armed forces”.

Wagner mercenaries are “going to take revenge on Putin” for “the death of their leader”, forecast Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, on social media. He said that “calls for revenge against the killers fill the chat rooms of Prigozhin’s channels”.

Yet Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and co-author of several books about Russia’s security services, felt the perceived operation was a success.

“The crisis has been dealt with quickly and effectively,” he told the Financial Times. Noting that Putin had taken time to deal with Prigozhin’s assets and punish hardliners before exacting his ultimate revenge, Soldatov referred to Machiavelli’s masterpiece, saying: “It’s ‘The Prince’ of the 21st century for you.”

Nevertheless, forecasts of impending problems for Putin are widespread today. Once the “long-term costs” of the “apparent assassination” have been accounted for, said Klaas, Prigozhin “may yet have the last laugh from beyond the grave”.