After Prigozhin, Putin reigns supreme
Hopes that the Wagner boss might have punctured the Russian president’s omnipotence have turned to dust
The meteoric rise to global prominence of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the notorious leader of the Wagner mercenary group, both peaked and came to a fiery end on August 23 when a private jet used by him and other senior Wagner figures, including its military commander Dmitry Utkin, crashed northwest of Moscow. The entire Wagner operation was deliberately shrouded by its creators in layers of myth, and the mysterious plane crash draws a final heavy veil over the affair.
But as the smoke disperses, one thing is already clear: there are no obstacles to Vladimir Putin’s ruthless system that are insurmountable for the Kremlin at this point. Consequently, Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine will continue unabated.
On June 23, many began to wonder whether somebody was finally going to solve the problem with Putin when Prigozhin, after months of lambasting the Russian military leadership for incompetence in Ukraine and even indirectly criticising the president himself, launched a brief mutiny. Wagner troops sped towards the capital in armoured vehicles, only to stop at the last moment under a murky deal negotiated with the Kremlin.
That months of Wagner’s unchecked insubordination and insults had culminated in a mutiny, and that the chief perpetrators of that humiliation had apparently got away scot-free, inflated hopes that Putin’s carefully crafted image of omnipotence had finally been pierced. Every day that Prigozhin and his men walked free, the thinking went, was a ticking timebomb under the president’s rule. In fact, the two months since the uprising were well spent by the regime in taking control of Prigozhin’s operations, dismantling his media empire and destroying his image.
Most Wagner fighters have now signed contracts with the defence ministry and been folded into regular units. And the Kremlin has made sure to reaffirm its ties to leaders in countries across Africa and the Middle East, where Wagner was active.
The day before Prigozhin’s plane crashed, Russia’s deputy defence minister, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, visited Libya to meet with renegade general Khalifa Haftar. The Kremlin was putting in place a contingency plan to ensure that Russia’s broader interests wouldn’t be affected with Prigozhin out of the picture. That plan has a chance of success — after all, the Wagner boss operated as a shadow emissary of Putin’s Russia, not as an independent actor.
The impact of Prigozhin’s departure on Putin’s grip on power at home is even more straightforward. If there was any hope that some of the hardliners harboured a different opinion on the war to the ultimate boss, it has been shattered. The surgically precise repression of rightwing critics of the Kremlin, such as the recent imprisonment of Igor Strelkov, a former FSB operative involved in fuelling the conflict in the Donbas back in 2014, underlines that.
The Prigozhin saga has taught the Russian elites a few new lessons about Putin — his procrastination when it comes to correcting mistakes and his emotional volatility when confronted with the consequences of his own poor judgment. And it has reminded them of his ruthlessness when it comes to dealing with enemies and traitors.
For this reason, Prigozhin’s departure is unlikely to have an impact on the course of the disastrous war that for Putin is an obsession. After all, the Russian leader has been able to fight that war for 18 months and to stall the Ukrainian effort to liberate more of its territory — not because of Wagner’s much-vaunted performance on the battlefield, but because of the sheer volume of resources the government can mobilise, the skill of people helping to keep the embattled Russian economy afloat, and Putin’s unchallenged position at home.
