Russia, One Sprawling Mafia

"It's not a state, it's not Russia. It's just one sprawling mafia, one tentacle of which is colliding with others."

"Prigozhin could have been quietly poisoned and he would have died of a heart attack, like many previous opponents of Putin or his generals."

"But apparently it was intended to serve as a show of uncompromising control over the situation."

"It is clear that just removing one person is not enough, you need to remove his key people, because they probably had a Plan B in case of losing their boss."

"Therefore, the ideal option is to eliminate them all together, which, in fact, happened."

Dmitry Oreshkin, professor, Free University Riga, Latvia 

"[The failure to punish Prigozhin initially had served to erode Putin's authority, sending] an open invitation to any potential rebels and mutineers."

"They [Russian spy agencies] could have worked on it for a long time and had the opportunity only now."

Abbas Gallyamov, former Putin speechwriter

A woman lays flowers at a makeshift memorial in Moscow for Yevgeny Prigozhin, believed to have been killed on Wednesday. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

 

Others of high influence, besides Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary group chief, were on the plane that so mysteriously crashed in flight just a short distance from Moscow. The flight manifest included Dmitry Utkin, an ex-military intelligence officer who directed Wagner's operations and the group's security chief, Valery Chekalov, along with four other Wagner elite officials. Best not to leave unscathed anyone who could invoke authority among the Wagner troops.

Leaderless, the fighting group could be persuaded to meld with the official Russian military. The Wagner group fighters are considered to be a more effective fighting force than the regular military and their additional numbers could benefit a military that has demonstrated its incapacity to succeed in its assigned 'special military operation', unable to effectively counter Ukraine's counteroffensive, much less ensure that Ukrainian drones were kept from plaguing Muscovites.

President Putin's previous order to his old pal Prigozhin, to integrate his forces with the Russian military were challenged by Prigozhin. Vladimir Putin does not tolerate insubordination, nor does he forget and forgive a former ally whose bravado and tactless insinuations and declarations brought chagrin and international attention to the Russian dictator's inability to control his appointed proxy turned challenger even if the challenge differentiated between Russia's military leaders and its supreme political leader.

 

Yevgeny Prigozhin a businessman with ‘difficult fate’, says Vladimir Putin – still from video

 

The embarrassment was Putin's at the hands of the swaggering, swashbuckling buccaneer who considered himself more fit to lead the military than Putin's appointed military elite. First it was General Sergei Surovikin, commander of the Russian air force, a collegial ally of Prigozhin's whose loyalty was suspect when he failed to order the Wagner convoy heading to Moscow bombed to stop their advance. 

 

Instead the Wagner convoy succeeded in shooting down Russian planes and killing Russian pilots. Surovikin's absence from public view in the months following the aborted insurrection was notable, and his dismissal preceded the crash of the business jet carrying the top leaders of the Wagner group.

 

Wagner mercenaries sit atop a tank outside the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24. Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said his forces were making a "march of justice" to Moscow.

 

All ten bodies, passengers and three crew were recovered, taken for forensic examinations. There could be no visual identification, they were burned beyond recognition. The crash widely accepted as a mass assassination, payback for the June mutiny that challenged Vladimir Putin's authority. The Russian president expressed his condolences for the deaths of those aboard the jet, in a televised interview. The field was cordoned off by police, where the plane crashed and burnt a few hundred kilometres north of Moscow, for investigators to study the site.

Pro-Wagner messaging app channels saw supporters of Prigozhin asserting the plane was deliberately destroyed, that it might have been hit by an air defence missile or targeted by an onboard bomb. "The downing of the plane was certainly no mere coincidence", declared director of NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Janis Sarts. Witnesses watched as the plane plummeted from a large smoke cloud, wildly twisting, missing one of its wings. The jet "exploded in the sky", "something sort of was torn from it in the air", said one of the observers.

According to a preliminary American intelligence assessment, the crash was intentionally caused by an explosion, but further than that blunt assessment no additional details were offered. For Putin, "revenge is a dish best served cold", observed CIA Director William Burns, speaking of the Russian leader as "the ultimate apostle of payback". The plane crash represented a signature tactic of dictatorial regimes to "bring an enemy or a traitor closer before destruction", as criminal clans do, in the opinion of Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Endowment.

"It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising."

"We know this pattern in Putin's Russia -- deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained."  

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock

People carry a body bag away from the wreckage of a crashed private jet, near the village of Kuzhenkino, Tver region, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023. (AP Photo)