Rule No 1 in Putin’s Russia: defy him at your peril

When Russia’s president Vladimir Putin let mercenary tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin escape seemingly unscathed after launching a mutiny in June, critics around the world seized on the Russian leader’s apparent show of wartime weakness. Some even said the brief rebellion presaged the start of the post-Putin era.

Two months later, Prigozhin is presumed dead in the mysterious crash of a private jet in a field between Moscow and St Petersburg. Putin is securely in the Kremlin, publicly eulogising Prigozhin as a talented person with a “complicated fate” who made many mistakes in life. And the remaining Wagner group leadership is either dead or silent.

American and other Western officials say their leading theory is that the plane was brought down by an explosion, and several, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they believed Putin ordered it destroyed.

In Putin’s Russia, fates can quickly change in a system in which existential affronts to the leader are neither forgiven nor forgotten. For more than two decades, individuals who have posed threats to the Russian leader have regularly found themselves exiled, imprisoned or dead, swiftly stripped of their power.

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The pattern began in the Russian leader’s earliest days, when Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch influential in Putin’s rise, ran afoul of him and fled, treated for years as a public enemy before his death in Britain in 2013 under murky circumstances. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another oligarch who failed to fall in line, spent more than a decade in prison.

Former members of the Russian security services considered traitors have met the grimmest fates. Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy who publicly accused Putin of running Russia like a crime syndicate, was fatally poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope in 2006. Sergei Skripal, the onetime intelligence officer who had been a double agent for the British, was derided by Putin as a “scumbag” and a “traitor” after narrowly surviving a 2018 assassination attempt with a deadly nerve agent.

Questions about Prigozhin’s fate have stalked his every move from the moment Putin delivered an address June 24th accusing him of ‘betrayal’

Those posing political threats to Putin have also suffered. Opposition campaigner Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Pro-democracy campaigner Alexei Navalny remains in prison in Russia, after surviving poisoning in 2020 with a nerve agent similar to the one used on Skripal.

Questions about Prigozhin’s fate stalked his every move from the moment Putin delivered an address June 24th accusing him of “betrayal”.

The word choice was unmistakable coming from an authoritarian leader who came up through the KGB and once famously called betrayal an unforgivable act.

‘Helplessness and flabbiness’

Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote last Thursday that when the word “traitor” is uttered by the leader in such a system, it must come with consequences.

“Otherwise a system built on informal, conceptual principles and practices, rather than on institutions, risks becoming unmanageable,” Baunov said. “The absence of clear signs of the punishment of Prigozhin,” and the fact that he seemed to travel freely within Russia, “were increasingly interpreted as signs of helplessness and flabbiness in the system.”

[ Putin sends condolences to family of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin after plane crash ]

[ Yevgeny Prigozhin: ‘He spun out of Putin’s control’ ]

The Wagner mutiny, which Prigozhin said was aimed at toppling Moscow’s military leadership but not the president, presented one of the biggest threats of Putin’s 23-year rule.

“This is a knife in the back of our country and our people,” Putin said then, noting that “inflated ambitions and personal interests” had led to “treason.”

For two months, Prigozhin functioned as a kind of ghost. He moved around Russia stealthily. He ceased releasing public statements. He slipped back into the shadows from which he had emerged the previous year

Putin refused to mention the tycoon by name, his common practice with those he views as enemies. The Russian leader vowed harsh punishment.

So the response was collective puzzlement when hours later the Kremlin announced a deal to end the mutiny, whereby Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries would escape punitive measures and Prigozhin would leave for Belarus without facing prosecution.

Some Kremlinologists theorised that Prigozhin escaped because he was too useful to the Kremlin, in Africa and potentially once again in Ukraine, where his forces wrested control of the city of Bakhmut in a rare Russian victory. Others said his fighters were too heavily armed and posed too big an immediate threat to be neutralised on the spot.

For two months, Prigozhin functioned as a kind of ghost. He moved around Russia stealthily. He ceased releasing public statements. He slipped back into the shadows from which he had emerged the previous year.

Putin, all the while, chipped away at the mercenary chief’s stature in public.

Vast arsenal

The Russian president emphasised that Wagner had been funded by the Russian state. The Russian defense ministry announced that it had collected the private military outfit’s vast arsenal of weaponry. Russian authorities set about dismantling the tycoon’s business empire.

In late July, Prigozhin popped up in St Petersburg while a Russia-Africa summit was taking place there. It yet again disproved the notion that he would retire to exile in Belarus and gave rise to speculation that he might have retained his influence at least as the Kremlin’s go-to man in Africa.

The mercenary tycoon sought to propagate that idea in a video he released this week, his first since the days of the mutiny.

Appearing in military fatigues in a place he said the heat was 50C, he said Wagner fighters were carrying out search and reconnaissance activities, “making Russia greater on all continents and making Africa even freer”.

The following day, a private jet with Prigozhin’s name on the passenger manifest went down in a field in the Tver region while flying from Moscow to St Petersburg.

The Russian military leaders that Prigozhin targeted in his short-lived mutiny, defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov, have remained in their positions. Putin regularly praises the Russian armed forces for holding back a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

In remarks last Thursday, Putin underscored the contribution Wagner fighters had made to Russia’s war against Ukraine, an attempt to address its members – many of whom feel used and discarded after heavy losses in battle – and their supporters.

Putin also expressed his “sincere sympathies” for the family members of those on board the flight and said an investigation would get to the bottom of what happened.

“It will be carried out in full and completed,” Putin said. “There is no doubt about that.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times

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