Ever since the leader of the notorious mercenary group “Wagner” led a brief insurrection and marched his forces from the Ukraine through Rostov-on-Don and within 200 km of Moscow, it was only a matter of time before Yevgeny Prigozhin would be made to answer for daring to challenge the authority of President Vladimir Putin.
If the reporting by Reuters, the BBC, and now everyone else picking up on the story is correct…it appears that one of Prigozhin’s private jets crashed to the northwest of Moscow in the Tver region with the Wagner commander being listed as a passenger aboard the Embraer Legacy 600.
Whilst Yevgeny might well be explaining his misdeeds in the depths of the hell he so richly deserved, don’t make the mistake of believing for even one second that Vladimir Putin did not order his assassination. Indeed, there is reporting from early July that suggested that the death warrant had been signed by Putin and the task of carrying out an assassination operation had been turned over to the FSB.
That would seem to explain the relatively muted reaction other than the speech denouncing Prigozhin as a traitor to Russia and Prigozhin seemingly able to travel to Moscow and St Petersburg at will.
That’s a classic from Putin’s KGB-inspired playbook…let the target think they’ve escaped the most serious consequences and let them get comfortable with moving about even when everyone else who knows how Putin treats those he considers to be traitors knows how the story must end.
You never know when the sword will fall upon the neck but you know it is always there to be wielded at the time that is considered most advantageous and convenient.
Certainly the two month anniversary of Prigozhin’s rebellion would have been noticed in the highest offices of the Kremlin. What better day to send a strong message of what happens to those who dare to disobey Vladimir Putin’s will?
Oh, I’m sure the investigation team that’s already been despatched to the crash site will do a thorough job of identifying the remains of the victims and will find some seemingly plausible reason for the plane falling out of the sky and crashing like shoddy maintenance or some other technical reason. They will produce a quite thorough report on the crash and to the average person it may well be believable.
To be fair, Russian aviation is far more dangerous now than it ever has been with the economic sanctions making getting spare parts for Western planes near impossible but that becomes a bit harder to believe for someone like Prigozhin who was known to operate anywhere from Africa to the Ukraine and all points in between. With the money and shady resources he had at his command, it’s unlikely his personal plane would be poorly maintained.
But I hardly need the picture that’s been verified of Prigozhin’s plane missing a wing as it plummets from 26,000 ft to know that it is exceptionally improbable the wing would have failed without “help”. The deflection forces modern aircraft wings are made to withstand make it much more likely the fuselage would fail before the wing does and the main cabin is still intact in this photo.
That leaves the other option being the plane was shot down, likely by ground-to-air missiles from the air defences in the region. No general would dare activate and fire those missiles on a civilian aircraft without an explicit order from the very top of the chain of command and that only happens if Putin issues the order first.
There is the possibility that Yevgeny Prigozhin was not on this particular aircraft as his other Legacy 600 was apparently in the air at the same time and then returned to Moscow soon after the first one fell from the sky.
It would not be out of character for FSB to see that Prigozhin’s name was listed on the passengers of the ill-fated plane if they knew the wrong plane was targeted in the operation and need some sort of cover story in case they need to disappear Prigozhin from the second plane and make sure he stays dead in accordance with the official government stance.
The only thing I’m waiting for is the Kremlin to blame Ukraine for Prigozhin’s death as a way of inflaming the Wagner fighters into exacting some measure of revenge against Ukraine rather than the person who would really be responsible.
Either way, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch of the imagination that Yevgeny Prigozhin was a dead man walking. If his defiant attitude prior to the march on Moscow wasn’t enough to earn him a death warrant, the insurrection itself coming close enough to see the outskirts of Moscow would have certainly earned him the only sort of “retirement” he would ever have the chance to know.
If Prigozhin truly is dead (one way or the other), if anything this is far more merciful than the very nasty death suffered by Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned by polonium-210 which is a *TRILLION* times more poisonous than hydrogen cyanide) or the poisoning of Sergei Skripal with Novichok nerve agent.
He will have only spent a few months constantly looking over his shoulder or wondering who would slip the poison into his food or drink. Some of Putin’s targets have spent years wondering when the fatal stroke would come at Putin’s order.
For what it’s worth, the only people I can truly imagine missing Yevgeny Prigozhin are the Wagner fighters who were always more loyal to him than they ever would be to Vladimir Putin. Now that their leader has apparently paid the ultimate price for his treachery, I would imagine they’re wondering when death will come calling for them as well.
Frankly, that sense of terror couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of bastards.