What a warlord’s death illustrates about Russia
Prigozhin's death raises questions about Vladimir Putin's future in office and the war in Ukraine. A warlord is dead and the wars continue.
Two months after his mutinous march on Moscow, Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead. A private plane he was travelling in exploded mid-air north of Moscow and came down in a freefall. Whether or not his death was an accident we may never know, but few seem to doubt who got it done, and why. A narrative has emerged about an unforgiving but secretive Vladimir Putin who exacts his revenge at a time and place of his choosing. The narrative may indeed reflect reality, and the episode from which it stems is revealing in multiple ways.
First, if Prigozhin’s death was a targeted killing mediated by the Russian establishment, then it foregrounds the wider issue of the difficult relationship between personal loyalty to the top leader and actions one undertakes with the conviction they serve the State. Prigozhin served the Russian State and repeatedly professed loyalty to its top leader. He was often amongst his men on the battlefield, and his Wagner fighters paid a heavy price in the capture and ruin of the Ukrainian cities of Soledar and Bakhmut earlier in the year. And while he abusively railed against Russia’s army leadership, he spared Putin. If he was to be believed, his mutiny aimed to remove what he claimed was an incompetent army leadership that was ill serving Russian war interests in Ukraine. From Prigozhin’s point of view, he was loyal and a patriot.
Imagine the dilemma the mutiny could have posed for Putin. A man personally loyal to him, who had done his bidding in the neighbourhood and beyond, acted in ways that weakened him in the eyes of Russians and the world, even though that man served the State with brutal effectiveness until then. Putin’s first response to the mutiny made his choice clear. Russia was a State with a 1,000-year history. It was locked in a battle in which his people’s fate was being decided. The mutiny was an “internal betrayal”, a “stab in the back” of the Russian people, a “treason” that threatened Russian unity. Without naming Prigozhin, Putin spoke of “exorbitant ambitions and personal interests [that had] led to treason”.
Putin’s words mortally condemned Prigozhin. The latter’s contributions dwarfed in the face of Russia’s existential battle to secure the sovereignty and freedom of its people. In an authoritarian setting, the leader personifies the State. This made Putin’s speech a classic instance of the State having the final say on what constitutes patriotism and who is a patriot. One needn’t sympathise with Prigozhin to take away the lesson that a battle between an individual’s conception of patriotism and the State’s monopoly over the definition of the patriot is not a pleasant sight in politics.
Second, the question of Putin’s future in office remains unsettled. With Ukraine’s counter-offensive yet to produce a breakthrough, news from the war is largely in his favour. On the same day that Prigozhin died, Sergei Surovikin, a top general who formerly commanded Russia’s war in Ukraine and was apparently close to Prigozhin, was removed as head of Russia’s aerospace forces. And the elimination of Prigozhin has put an end to speculation about Putin’s hold over power given the mobility and visibility Prigozhin continued to enjoy in the interim.
Putin may have asserted control for now but the challenge he faces has not disappeared. This is because his decision to stay in office for as long as he wishes to, which he effectively made through constitutional changes in 2020, is likely to have made possible contenders to the top job impatient. The comfortable moment that he currently enjoys in the war may change if Ukraine makes a breakthrough or the contrived resilience of Russia’s war economy begins to unravel. And whether Prigozhin could undertake a mutiny without support within Russia’s power establishment remains a puzzle. It is possible that internal purges have taken place that we don’t know about. Putin is the longest serving Russian or Soviet leader in the past century, save Joseph Stalin. And so, the question is whether a long-serving autocrat waging a costly and unnecessary war can ever be secure of his time in office.
Finally, Prigozhin’s death will not put an end to Wagner as a fighting force. As a colleague pointed out to this writer, Wagner is part of a large pool of mercenary fighters that have thrived in a vastness of unresolved territorial and ethnic disputes that emerged from the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union. They are spread across the Caucasus, the Donbass, Moldova and Belarus, working alongside professional armies. That Russia intends to keep the mercenaries in play is clear from their being stationed in Belarus, an effective puppet State, as well as from various efforts to make them more accountable to the Russian State. They will continue to perform the destabilising role that Moscow wants them to. The Wagner group is also critical to Russia’s efforts to expand its influence across north and central Africa, where a recent coup in Niger has further weakened the West’s position.
A warlord is dead; the wars continue.
Atul Mishra teaches international politics at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. The views expressed are personal
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