Just because the news broke on Wednesday of the presumed loss of life of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a darkish stage lit dramatically in purple.
He held a second of silence, flanked by service members in costume uniforms, whereas a metronome’s beats sounded, just like the gradual ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.
The eerie cut up display screen — the reported fiery demise of the person who launched an armed insurrection in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s navy may — could have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and energy that Mr. Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, seems extra decided than ever to undertaking.
Mr. Prigozhin could have been brutally efficient, throwing tens of 1000’s of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in japanese Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces within the course of and hobbling Kyiv’s potential to stage a counteroffensive. His web “troll farm” helped the Kremlin intervene within the 2016 American presidential election, whereas his mercenary empire helped Russia exert affect throughout Africa and the Middle East.
But together with his June insurrection, Mr. Prigozhin threatened one thing much more delicate: Mr. Putin’s personal maintain on energy. After the crash of Mr. Prigozhin’s airplane on Wednesday, the Kremlin seems to be sending the message that no diploma of effectiveness and achievement can defend somebody from punishment for violating Mr. Putin’s loyalty.
“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, mentioned of the response among the many Russian elite to the airplane crash Wednesday that Western officers theorize was attributable to an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”
Never earlier than has somebody so central to Russia’s ruling institution been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, mentioned Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.
“This is a rather harsh precedent,” Mr. Vinogradov mentioned, including that the Kremlin gave the impression 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 many Putin system’s strongest gamers had been killed towards the Kremlin’s needs, it could ship a devastating sign of Mr. Putin’s lack of management.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, mentioned on Friday that the suggestion by overseas officers that the Kremlin was behind Mr. Prigozhin’s loss of life was an “absolute lie.”
To some, the truth that Mr. Prigozhin was capable of survive for 2 months after staging his insurrection was extra shocking than the crash of his non-public jet. In an deal with to the nation on June 24, as Mr. Prigozhin’s forces had been marching on Moscow and already in charge of a metropolis of 1,000,000 individuals in Russia’s southwest, Mr. Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”
And betrayal, Mr. Putin has mentioned beforehand, is the one act that can’t be forgiven. So when Mr. Putin appeared to strike a cope with Mr. Prigozhin permitting him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as an indication of the president dropping management. The view was magnified when images surfaced of Mr. Prigozhin assembly with African officers 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,” mentioned Aleksei A. Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station earlier than the Kremlin shut it down final yr.
Mr. Venediktov, in an interview in Moscow on Thursday, argued that Mr. Prigozhin’s obvious loss of life had strengthened Mr. Putin’s dominance within the Russian political system after the chaos of the insurrection. Now, “Putin has shown his elite,” Mr. Venediktov went on, that “any betrayal will be found out.”
U.S. officers are more and more sure that Mr. Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Mr. Putin ordered the assassination. But relating to the ability dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether or not Mr. Putin personally ordered the assault could also be irrelevant: What issues is that Mr. Prigozhin suffered a violent loss of life after Mr. Putin publicly condemned him.
“He called him a traitor,” Mr. Remchukov mentioned. “And that was enough for everyone to see that this person is no longer invulnerable.”
When Mr. Putin broke his silence in regards to the airplane crash on Thursday, some 24 hours after it occurred, he described Mr. Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Mr. Putin revealed that his private ties with Mr. Prigozhin dated again to the early Nineties, and he acknowledged for the primary time that he had personally requested Mr. Prigozhin to hold out duties 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 mentioned.
Mr. Prigozhin had lengthy been suspected of appearing within the shadows in Mr. Putin’s curiosity whereas giving the Kremlin believable deniability. His forces deployed to japanese Ukraine in 2014, again when Mr. Putin was stoking a separatist battle there whereas insisting he had nothing to do with it. In 2016, Mr. Prigozhin’s web “troll farm” intervened in American politics as a part of the Kremlin’s try to swing the presidential election to President Donald J. Trump.
But what Mr. Putin left unsaid in his temporary eulogy of Mr. Prigozhin was that by turning towards the Russian president after a long time of devoted service, Mr. Prigozhin could have signed his personal loss of life sentence.
On Friday, one other longtime confidant of Mr. Putin, Aleksei Dyumin, issued a press release that made the message a bit of clearer. Mr. Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Mr. Putin who’s now the governor of a area south of Moscow, mentioned he had identified Mr. Prigozhin “as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless man.” He mentioned he mourned all Wagner fighters who had died in Ukraine, and added: “You can forgive mistakes and even cowardice, but never betrayal. They were not traitors.”
The obvious subtext was that Mr. Prigozhin’s troopers and commanders had been loyal males worthy of respect. But it additionally hinted on the notion that if Mr. Prigozhin himself was a traitor — as Mr. Putin had mentioned — then he could have deserved his loss of life.
But Mr. Prigozhin’s loss of life additionally carries dangers for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one in every of Russia’s best and brutal combating forces, exacting and taking huge casualties within the monthslong battle for the Ukrainian metropolis of Bakhmut.
In Africa, the place Mr. Prigozhin constructed a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in international locations like Mali and the Central African Republic, it’s removed from clear whether or not Wagner will be capable to retain its footprint. Wagner’s high navy commander, Dmitri V. Utkin, was listed as a passenger alongside Mr. Prigozhin on the airplane that crashed, in line with the Russian authorities.
Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr. Putin who’s now a political advisor primarily based in Israel, mentioned the Kremlin was most probably behind the airplane crash, and he argued that the dangerous determination to kill Mr. Prigozhin with the intention to ship a sign of deterrence revealed the president’s fears of dropping energy.
“To send this signal, Putin decided to risk a bunch of projects,” Mr. Gallyamov wrote on social media. “This is important for understanding what his priorities are right now: maintaining power, not external expansion.”
Mr. Putin has additionally lengthy made it clear that he sees his private pursuits as inextricable from these of the Russian state. “He believes that if something is important for keeping him in power, then all other concerns are secondary,” mentioned Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science on the European University at St. Petersburg.
It’s a philosophy that Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s decrease home of Parliament, summed up merely earlier this yr: “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia.”
Source: www.nytimes.com