Prigozhin plane crash deepens Putin’s vengeful ‘prison culture’.
Russian Paramilitary Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Assassination Sparks Concerns of Internal Turmoil
The apparent assassination of Russian paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has the potential to ignite another cycle of internal bloodshed, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to assert authority within the Russian system.
“Basically, you are creating another group of people who want revenge, again,” a senior European official observed. “So it’s not solving the root issues.”
Prigozhin’s death has triggered an outpouring of grief and anger among his followers within the Wagner Group’s online community and at makeshift shrines in St. Petersburg, his hometown. Putin, who expressed his “sincere condolences” for the death of the Wagner brass, is widely believed to have sanctioned the move against Prigozhin in response to his former ally’s failed attempt to march on Moscow in June.
“The fact that our best soldiers died in battle is the will of God,” a Prigozhin-aligned Telegram channel wrote on Thursday. “Probably whoever organized it thinks he’s won, but he hasn’t… if it’s a knife in the back, the motherland will survive but your fate as Judas is unenviable.”
This furious statement reflects the loyalty code that Prigozhin enforced through his own displays of ostentatious violence. Once known as “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin rose to prominence during Russia’s campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Wagner Group, battle-tested in the Syrian civil war and bolstered by recruits from Russian prisons, gained a reputation for both competence and brutality. The sledgehammer became a symbol of the war in Russian society after the Wagner Group used it in a filmed execution of a deserter.
“I think this movie is called ‘A Dog’s Death to a Dog,'” Prigozhin remarked in November as the video of the killing circulated on Twitter. “This show demonstrates that the sledgehammer-ed [man] didn’t find happiness in Ukraine but was met with unkind but fair people.”
This incident highlighted Prigozhin’s emergence as a martial figure with a flair for performance, amidst setbacks for the wider Russian military campaign. He cultivated a reputation for serious-minded commitment to military tasks, often publicly mocking Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other senior leaders. The acrimony between factions of Russia’s power structures shattered the facade of traditional Russian institutions.
“I don’t know whether the Taliban government could do this,” said Russian economist Konstantin Sonin, a Putin critic. “These sort of things happened in Afghanistan in the 90s, where they had… enemies, but ministers in the same cabinet.”
These denunciations foreshadowed Prigozhin’s eventual break with Moscow officialdom and his shocking yet short-lived uprising, which Putin labeled an “armed mutiny” but ultimately chose to overlook to avoid a bloody showdown in Moscow.
“It was pretty clear at the time that that was not likely to be a long-term solution… that long term, this is not workable,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “So, it’s not surprising that they took some kind of action.”
According to Igor Girkin, an ultranationalist war hawk recently imprisoned for mocking Putin’s leadership, assessments like Sonin’s point to the right decade but the wrong country. Girkin downplayed the idea that Putin or other senior military leaders ordered Prigozhin’s death but hinted at more mysterious malevolence within Russia.
“Here we can talk about the ‘cleansing of key witnesses,’ about which there was not a sound in the media,” Girkin stated through his attorney on social media. “It is yet another evidence of the further deepening of unrest in Russia. Prigozhin should have been tried, not eliminated; now he will not be able to testify. The dashing 90s are returning, and this is very dangerous and fraught.”
For Sonin and other Putin critics, the public spectacle of Prigozhin’s death underscores the decay of Russian institutions.
“I do not believe that Putin will ever restore order, and these things will continue to happen until he is gone,” Sonin remarked. “People who come after him… it will be up to them to root out these rogue security services and rogue Army personnel. A normal state does not have these killer squads.”
In the meantime, Putin seems to be living by the code that Prigozhin once touted.
“It just confirms how the prison culture is ruling there; that’s the way prison [disputes] are solved… It’s absolutely prison culture,” the senior European official stated. “The motivation is built on threatening [people], but with that, you are not getting 100% out of the people. You cannot even call them your people because you have such big differences between the factions.”
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