THE RUSSIA CONNECTIONYevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner Group Boss Joins Long List of Those Who Challenged Vladimir Putin and Paid the Price
It is unlikely that we will ever know for sure how, why and on whose orders Prigozhin might have been killed, but it is far less difficult to imagine that he finally paid the price for his march on Moscow at the head of a column of his Wagner Group troops at the end of June 2023. Though abrupt, his death is not unexpected. Under Putin, a former KGB operative himself, Russia has carried out several high-profile assassinations and assassination attempts to go after alleged traitors and Putin critics.
Two months after challenging Vladimir Putin’s leadership in an apparent but abortive “mutiny”, Yevgeny Prigozhin – the former owner of the mercenary private military company Wagner Group – has joined a long list of prominent Russians to die in mysterious circumstances.
Prigozhin’s private jet apparently crashed on a routine flight from Moscow to St Petersburg just after 3pm local time. Confirmation of Prigozhin’s likely demise came in the form of announcements by Russia’s authorities and a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner group. Conveniently, there was also video footage of the plane falling out of the sky and burning on the ground.
With him on the aircraft was Dmitry Utkin, widely considered to be his second in command at the Wagner Group. Other passengers are reported to have included Valery Chekalov, the head of Wagner security, Yevgeny Makaryan, who has been described as Prigozhin’s bodyguard and other Wagner Group personnel.
While it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure how, why and on whose orders Prigozhin might have been killed, it is far less difficult to imagine that he finally paid the price for his march on Moscow at the head of a column of his Wagner Group troops at the end of June 2023. The deaths of other top Wagner personnel in the crash spell the likely end of the group in its current form.
At the time, Prigozhin went to great lengths to paint his mutiny as directed against the top brass in the Russian ministry of defense and not as a direct challenge to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Yet the brief episode exposed cracks in the regime. Unopposed by local and regional security forces, Prigozhin’s troops were able to take Rostov-on-Don and the headquarters of Russia’s southern military district and command center of the war in Ukraine. They also marched to within 200km (125 miles) of the Russian capital, again mostly unopposed.
Following a deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin called off his rebellion, agreeing to relocate his men and himself to Belarus and Wagner’s overseas bases – mostly in Africa.
Despite some concerns over an increasing Wagner presence closer to NATO members Poland and Lithuania, little of the agreed relocation seems to have happened. Prigozhin himself appears to have enjoyed significant freedom of movement in Russia in the weeks after his abortive mutiny, including making an appearance on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa summit at the end of July.
