Ukraine is still grappling with the battlefield Prigozhin left behind

MOSCOW - As the Russian military reeled on the battlefield in Ukraine last autumn, a foul-mouthed ex-convict with a personal connection to President Vladimir Putin stepped out of the shadows to help.

Yevgeny Prigozhin for years had denied any connection to the Wagner mercenary group and operated discreetly on the margins of Russian power, trading in political skulduggery, cafeteria meals and lethal force.

Now he was front and centre, touting the Wagner brand known for its savagery and personally recruiting an army of convicts to aid a flailing Russian war operation starved for personnel.

The efforts that Prigozhin and a top Russian general seen as close to him, General Sergei Surovikin, would undertake in the subsequent months would alter the course of the war.

Both men have since been taken out of action.

Prigozhin is presumed to have died in a plane crash on Wednesday,

an incident that came two months after he

launched a failed mutiny

and which US and Western officials believe was the result of an explosion on board.

Several said they thought Mr Putin ordered the plane destroyed, suggestions the Kremlin on Friday

dismissed as an “absolute lie”.

Gen Surovikin, who US officials have said had advance knowledge of the mutiny, hasn’t been seen in public since the day of the revolt and, according to Russian state news media, was formally dismissed from his post leading Russia’s aerospace forces this week.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces are still grappling with their impact.

Prigozhin led the brutal fight in Bakhmut through the winter and into the spring, relying on unorthodox recruitment of prison inmates to quickly bolster Russia’s badly depleted front-line forces.

The battle, one of the bloodiest of the war, sapped Ukraine of trained soldiers before the counteroffensive, while Russia lost personnel it saw as largely expendable.

“When the Russian military was at its most vulnerable, he provided an important reserve force to buy time for them,” Ms Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corp, said of Prigozhin.

Prigozhin’s forces eventually took a devastated Bakhmut. And his contribution to the Russian war effort at an important moment, coupled with a newfound public stature owing to scores of expletive-laden comments and videos on social media, fed his ego.

“Prigozhin would have you believe they were the only thing saving the Russian military. In reality, they were out front, but they couldn’t do what they did without the Russian Ministry of Defense,” said Ms Massicot.

The grisly battle stoked his hatred of the Russian military to such a degree that he ultimately mounted a shocking uprising to eliminate its leadership, running gravely afoul of the unspoken rules of Putin’s system in the process.

“Prigozhin over time developed a kind of main character syndrome,” Ms Massicot said. “And in Russia, there is only one main character. He sits in the Kremlin.”

The mutiny came after Prigozhin’s usefulness on the battlefield had faded.

Russia’s shift to defence had stabilised the lines. The personnel crisis became less acute. In late May, Wagner left the battlefield.

“Wagner’s strategic utility likely peaked during the winter and spring,” said Mr Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“After that, it is difficult to see how Wagner would have proven decisive in this war. Their greatest utility was not in defending but in fighting for cities.”

Prigozhin’s presumed death at the age of 62 capped the life of a man who rose from a Soviet prison to Russia’s most elite circles of power, ultimately erecting a private empire that fed off Putin’s increased appetite for confrontation and desire to reassert Russia on the world stage.

While amassing a personal fortune from government catering and construction contracts, Prigozhin crafted a role for himself at the tip of Russia’s geopolitical spear, his stature growing alongside Putin’s willingness to take risks.

He thrived in the secretive space between formal Russian power and its targets. Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 popularised the concept of “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone tactics,” which Prigozhin adopted as his freewheeling outfit’s specialties.

“With the creation of Wagner in 2014 and all of the deployments we have seen since, he established a way to really revolutionize how a private military company could be used in this targeted, coordinated way to advance Russian geopolitical interests,” said Ms Catrina Doxsee, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Wagner assault teams helped Russia execute a final land grab in eastern Ukraine in 2015. For years, the mercenary group carried out select missions in Syria, relieving the Russian military of the need to deploy large numbers of ground troops so it could achieve its goals with air power and a limited footprint.

Prigozhin attracted global renown when his St. Petersburg, Russia, troll factory intervened in the 2016 US presidential election and helped stir up right-wing populism in Europe. Later, he expanded his security services into Africa, all the while finding business opportunities, from mining to oil, that came easily to a person operating a private army with the Kremlin’s imprimatur.

Putin’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine

would become as existential for the Kremlin as it would for Prigozhin, bringing the risk-taking to extremes that tested the system and the individuals within it.

At first, Prigozhin seemed to thrive. But as his ego grew, his usefulness to the Russian military waned, an unstable blend that exploded in the June mutiny, rupturing a relationship with Putin that went back to the 1990s in their mutual hometown, St Petersburg.

The tycoon had spent nearly a decade behind bars in the 1980s, having been found guilty by a Soviet court of robbery and other crimes, including one incident in which prosecutors alleged he choked a woman into unconsciousness before making off with her gold earrings.

While he made inroads with Putin after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he didn’t come from the world of former KGB associates who would rise along with the Russian leader to dominate the country’s levers of power.

Putin seemed to emphasise that Thursday when he noted that Prigozhin was a “talented person” who in life made many mistakes.

“I think some of these miscalculations came from believing that he was part of the system,” Doxsee said.

“But I don’t think Putin ever stopped believing that he was anything other than a useful outsider.” NYTIMES