Does the Killing of Wagner Boss Strengthen or Weaken Putin’s Grip on Power in Russia?

The crash of a Russian plane carrying the founder of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which Western media suggested was an assassination, brought to mind the country’s long history of mysterious assassinations targeting opponents and dissidents, many of which have not been solved to this day.

The absence of the group’s leader, who was Putin’s upper hand outside the country’s borders, will cast a heavy shadow over the militia’s future and the countries in which it operated.

Wagner’s rebellion last June was the biggest challenge to the prestige that Russian President Putin has drawn at home and abroad and among the Russian and Western elites since the beginning of his rule.

On the other hand, Western analysts saw that Prigozhin’s bloody end would enhance President Vladimir Putin’s authority more than ever before and would help restore his image as a strong man and intelligent fox capable of getting rid of his opponents.

In conjunction with the Prigozhin plane incident, Putin relieved General Sergey Surovikin of his command of the Russian Air Force for his involvement in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June.

In the aftermath of the incident, on August 25, Putin issued a presidential decree forcing the fighters of the Wagner Military Group to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state, which is a clear step to bring this military militia under stricter state control.

 

Putin’s Revenge

The death of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash near the Russian capital, Moscow, on August 23 is a natural end according to Russian history, as rival leaders or defectors disappear in a dramatic way through assassinations that often raise unanswered questions.

Western analysts suggested that Prigozhin’s death was an assassination attempt that came on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin following the rebellion led by Wagner’s commander against the Russian regime in late June, which the Russian leadership considered an armed rebellion and gave orders to deal with.

According to Agence France-Presse, a number of senior leaders of the Wagner Group were on board the crashed plane, including Dmitry Utkin, an assistant to Prigozhin, who is believed to be a former officer in the Russian military intelligence service, in addition to Valery Chekalov, one of the directors of Concord, which Prigozhin founded.

In addition to the armed rebellion against the senior leaders of the Russian army, the reasons that prompted the accusation of orchestrating the killing of Wagner’s commander towards the top of the pyramid of power in the Kremlin is Putin’s history of eliminating his opponents, and Moscow’s strictness towards any opposition since the start of its war on its neighbor Ukraine in February 2022.

On its part, Western media reports revealed that what happened with the leader of the Wagner Group was a message to the Russian elite that betrayal cannot be forgiven, and the response to it will be swift.

The Financial Times said that the eight weeks that Prigozhin spent in semi-exile between Belarus and Africa, during which he returned to Russia and met Putin in the Kremlin, was just a prelude to Putin’s elaborate revenge against the Wagner leader’s rebellion.

“The internal investigation of the mutiny is completed. Surovikin was dismissed yesterday, and the culprits have been executed,” said Grigory Yudin, head of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, noting that the verdict and its implementation took two months.

On its part, Radio Free Europe said that many in the Russian elite saw Putin’s apparent leniency with Prigozhin as a point of weakness in light of the fact that Putin’s critics suffered terrible fates with bullets and strange poisons.

The radio quoted experts as saying that what happened was a reaffirmation of control, so that if you dare to challenge Putin, this is what will happen to you, as if we are in front of a scene in the movie The Godfather, and this is how the system works.

They also said that Prigozhin’s death opens an opportunity for Putin to dismantle the Wagner Group as a Russian mercenary group and bring parts of it under greater Kremlin control to prevent it from threatening again.

According to CIA Director Bill Burns to The Economist, if Prigozhin’s killing is on Putin’s orders, it will cement the president’s image as a vengeful strongman willing to dispense with procedure and law.

In turn, Dr. Nasr al-Youssef indicated in a statement to Al-Estiklal that “Prigozhin’s assassination can be considered as a reproduction of the image of the strong man in the Kremlin.”

He added, “What happened recently confirms Putin’s strength, which some have recently questioned, especially after he sank into the quagmire of Ukraine and was subjected to an internal rebellion, which put Putin at the time in a critical position in front of the Russian people and the world.”

 

Wagner’s Future

After the departure of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the future of the Russian private military group became questionable, given its spread in many countries, in addition to the economic interests that linked Prigozhin with several countries, especially in Africa.

Writer Peter Beaumont saw in an article published in The Guardian that Putin contained Wagner’s rebellion last June and later punished its planners, pointing out that the CIA expected Putin to take his time to retaliate.

The writer explained that Wagner’s attempt to rebel against the Kremlin led to a significant reduction in its prominent role in the Russian military operations in Ukraine, stressing that Wagner no longer exists as it was in the past, especially after sending its fighters to bases in Belarus, and others moving to work in West Africa.

The Washington Post reported that Andrei Troshev, who was the mediator between Prigozhin and the Russian army, is one of the possible candidates for Wagner’s leadership.

It noted that Troshev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, was one of the few figures in the security group who were not on the plane of the Wagner founder that crashed.

In recent weeks, military bloggers linked to Wagner reported that Troshev was kicked out of the group for betraying Prigozhin after the June Rebellion, pointing out that he was keen to strike a deal with the Defense Ministry, with which Prigozhin had deep disagreements in the months leading up to his failed rebellion.

Whoever the next leader is, many predictions have gone that Wagner will not return to its former strength, which Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, also told Axios.

The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense will either bring Wagner “fully to heel” or completely dismantle it, said Eugene Finkel, an associate professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

Finkel told Axios that one of the main remaining questions is who will run companies linked to Wagner and Prigozhin’s vast business empire, which includes gold and diamond mines, oil and gas operations, and other ventures in at least 15 countries.

It is noteworthy that in the days leading up to the plane crash, two private military groups (PMC Redut and Convoy) began hiring people to carry out operations in Ukraine and Africa, which the Washington Post interpreted as the Kremlin’s willingness to compensate for some security contracts for Wagner.

“Prigozhin is the mainstay of the Wagner Group, and it is unlikely that it will survive without him. It is the end of Wagner that we have known,” military analyst Sean Bell told Sky News.

 

Kremlin Foes

The death of Prigozhin, who posed the greatest threat to the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin since 1999, brought to mind Russia’s long history of assassinations of dissidents and opponents.

Putin has dealt harshly with his political opponents. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch and independent political activist, was forced to leave Russia. Opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who have been highly critical of Putin, have also been poisoned and imprisoned.

The last possible assassination attempt carried out by the Russian intelligence services was what happened to the famous Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in an attempt of poisoning with a nerve agent dating back to the Soviet era, known as Novichok, in August 2020.

After that, Navalny returned to Russia, and this month, he was convicted of extremism and was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

In 2015 and 2017, prominent Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza survived two poisoning attempts and nearly died of kidney failure.

The Russian dissident was convicted of treason this year and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In March 2017, former member of the Russian Communist Party Denis Voronenkov, who had begun to criticize Putin after fleeing to Ukraine in 2016 and who was a key witness in a treason case against former President Viktor Yanukovych, was shot dead outside a hotel in Kyiv.

In February 2015, liberal politician Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant in plain sight of the Kremlin, just hours after he had urged the Russian people to join a rally against Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

In 2013, Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and independent political activist who was instrumental in Putin’s rise to power, was found dead in his home in the United Kingdom.

In 2006, the Kremlin was accused of the murder of former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko in a London hotel by two Russian agents, who put the deadly polonium-210 in his cup of tea.

In 2003, Colonel Sergei Yushenkov, who had just registered his Liberal Movement as a political party, was shot dead outside his home in Moscow.

In July 2003, officer Yuri Shchekochikhin died after contracting a mysterious illness a few days before he was due to leave for the United States.

The common denominator in the deaths of Litvinenko, Yushenkov, and Shchekochikhin is that they accuse Putin’s government of being behind a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, which left hundreds dead, and which was the Russian president’s justification for entering the second Chechen war.

Credit: The Sunday Times

The list was not limited to Russian dissidents. Former pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, for example, was poisoned with industrial dioxin in a meal of boiled crayfish by Russian agents.

But there are those who survived the Russian poison, as the British authorities found retired Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal (66 years old) and his daughter Yulia (33 years old) on March 4, 2018, passed out on a bench in downtown Salisbury after they were poisoned with nerve gas.

There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including falling from windows, although whether they were deliberate killings or suicides is sometimes difficult to determine.