With Prigozhin’s death, Putin projects message of power

LONDON – Just as the news broke on Wednesday of the

presumed death of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin,

President Vladimir Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a dark stage lit dramatically in red.

He

held a moment of silence,

flanked by service members in dress uniforms, while a metronome’s beats sounded, like the slow ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.

The eerie split screen – the reported fiery demise of the man who launched an armed rebellion in June and the Russian President telegraphing the state’s military might – may have been coincidental.

But it underscored the imagery of dominance and power that Mr Putin, 18 months into his invasion of Ukraine, appears more determined than ever to project.

Mr Prigozhin may have been brutally effective, throwing tens of thousands of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces and hobbling Kyiv’s ability to stage a counteroffensive.

His Internet “troll farm” helped the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East.

But with his June rebellion, Mr Prigozhin threatened something even more sensitive: Mr Putin’s own hold on power.

After the crash of Mr Prigozhin’s plane on Wednesday, the Kremlin appears to be sending the message that no degree of effectiveness and achievement can protect someone from punishment for violating Mr Putin’s loyalty.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Mr Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, said of the reaction among the Russian elite to the plane crash that Western officials theorise was caused by an explosion on board.

“It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”

Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, said Mr Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.

“This is a rather harsh precedent,” he added, noting that the Kremlin appeared to be doing little to dissuade Russians of the view that it had sanctioned Mr Prigozhin’s killing.

After all, if members of the ruling elite concluded that one of the Putin system’s most powerful players had been killed against the Kremlin’s wishes, it would send a devastating signal of Mr Putin’s loss of control.

Mr Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said on Friday that the suggestion by foreign officials that the Kremlin was behind Mr Prigozhin’s death was an “absolute lie”.

To some, the fact that Mr Prigozhin was able to survive for two months after staging his rebellion was more surprising than the crash of his private jet.

In an address to the nation on June 24, as his forces were marching on Moscow and already in control of a city of a million people in Russia’s south-west, Mr Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal”.

And betrayal, Mr Putin has said previously, is the one act that cannot be forgiven.

So when he appeared to strike a deal with Mr Prigozhin allowing him to retreat safely to neighbouring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as a sign of the president losing control.

The view was magnified when photographs surfaced of Mr Prigozhin meeting African officials on the sidelines of Mr Putin’s marquee summit with African leaders in St Petersburg in July.

“After he ‘forgave’ Prigozhin, it was understood by those around him as weakness,” said Mr Alexei Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station before the Kremlin shut it down last year.

In an interview in Moscow on Thursday, he argued that Mr Prigozhin’s apparent death had strengthened Mr Putin’s dominance in the Russian political system after the chaos of the rebellion. Now, “Putin has shown his elite” that “any betrayal will be found out”.

US officials are increasingly certain that Mr Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Mr Putin ordered the assassination.

But when it comes to the power dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether Mr Putin personally ordered the attack may be beside the point. What matters is that Mr Prigozhin suffered a violent death after Mr Putin publicly condemned him.

When Mr Putin broke his silence about the crash on Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened, he described Mr Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate”.

He revealed that his personal ties with Mr Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he personally asked him to carry out tasks on his behalf.

“He made some serious mistakes in life but he also achieved necessary results, for himself and, when I asked him about it, for our common cause,” Mr Putin said.

But Mr Prigozhin’s death also carries risks for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one of Russia’s most effective and brutal fighting forces, exacting and taking enormous casualties in the months-long battle for the city of Bakhmut.

In Africa, where Mr Prigozhin built a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in countries such as Mali and the Central African Republic, it is far from clear whether Wagner will be able to retain its footprint.

Wagner’s top military commander Dmitri Utkin was listed as a passenger alongside Mr Prigozhin on the plane that crashed, according to Russian authorities. NYTIMES