Prigozhin's Jet Didn't Crash Itself

Kremlin politics are brutal

The wing of this plane did not detach itself during the Wagner mutiny and neither did the wing of Prigozhin’s plane

How quickly fortunes can fall. Recent rumors about Alexander Lukashenko refusing to finance Wagner’s payroll make more sense now that Belarus has cut their camp communications in the moment of crisis. Yevgeny Prigozhin was rich, but his company has state-level resource requirements beyond his individual means. When Lukashenko thought Prigozhin might help his impoverished country, he was happy to let Prigozhin and thousands of Wagnerites stay in safety at a field camp. When the bill arrived, however, Luka balked, and looked for a way to dispose of his new debts. Vladimir Putin was only too happy to help. The mark made it easy by flying off to Africa in search of kleptocratic profits.

Prigo — I like calling him that because it sounds like a brand of tomato sauce, which is appropriate for Tony Soprano with a global mercenary company — was positively identified among the dead. Alongside him were the corpses of everyone in his inner circle at Wagner. All the important people on one plane: Prigo died with overconfident disdain for basic security practices. His allies in the services and military intelligence, most notably generals Surovikin and Alekseev respectively, had already been neutralized. These were the most successful wartime leaders Russia had, just two months ago. Stalin at least had the foresight to complete his purges before he started his wars. Vladimir Putin has put his most loyal, and therefore least capable, people in complete charge, now. Competency has been thoroughly punished.

If Vladimir Putin has won his domestic war it does not follow that he will now succeed in Ukraine. Regime survival is prioritized over regime success according to the ironclad rules of Russian autarky. Telegram channels are reportedly full of dire pronouncements of looming revenge. These postings may accurately reflect the mood in the wider armed forces, but they mainly serve to identify the authors to the FSB, which is the only agency in Russia with any agency anymore. Wagnerites will have their hands full just getting out of Belarus.

Clearly, the FSB is on-side with the shootdown. Prigo earned the mode of his death by killing Russian pilots suppressing the Wagner mutiny; vengeance reportedly came in a box formation of four surface-to-air missile systems. Networked radars, and a pair of missiles launched from a rear quadrant of Prigo’s Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet as it flew from the Moscow air defense zone towards St. Petersburg, so that no one on the plane could see the missiles approaching, were payback for the Russian aircrews killed by Wagner Pantsir systems on their abortive march.

Through loyalty to Putin, the FSB has won their institutional war with the Main Directorate, formerly known as GRU, more correctly identified as military intelligence. The FSB had lost Putin’s trust after the debacles of the 2022 invasion but now they are restored to his confidence. The rise and fall of Main Directorate relative to FSB is inside baseball, perhaps, but it shows where the internal stresses of the regime have been.

Deputy chief Gen. Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseev and GRU were close partners of Wagner. Alekseev recorded a video in Rostov-on-Don disagreeing with Prigo’s demonstration, but went missing thereafter and has not resurfaced. Being sanctioned as the man who oversaw the Skripal operation, he could very well never reappear. Gen. Sergey Surovikin, ‘General Armageddon,’ has reportedly been forcibly retired for his role in the Wagner mutiny, but at least lives under house arrest instead of a hole somewhere.

Kremlinology is more art than science most of the time, and I am no Kremlinologist. Nevertheless, one need not be a Kremlin history expert to understand what killing Prigo is supposed to achieve. Put together with the arrest of Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, for public attacks on Putin, and we begin to see the sum of Putin’s fears. He does not worry about his dissidents like Alexei Navalny, who are easily controlled because they only offer political resistance. Putin is worried about the threat from his ‘right,’ which is less ideological than militant. He is afraid of his pro-war patriots.

Ambiguity is an intentional part of the message. It is clear to everyone in Russia just what happened to Prigo’s jet. It did not crash all by itself. It did not experience a smoking accident or sudden catastrophic wing failure. Everyone knows, but cannot prove, that Prigo and his team were made into examples for the ‘war party’ in Russia. Putin can celebrate in private and still memorialize the ‘hero’ in death, a very Russian hypocrisy.

Putin’s peculiar determinism — his esoteric theory of history — requires the west to collapse altogether, a victim of its own liberal democratic habits, before Russia assumes its final form as the global totalitarian superstate of the world-island. Storm-Z and the early patriotic displays after February 2022 have given way to toned-down May Day parades with a single T-34 and cancelled parades of families of the fallen because Putin does not want his society politicized. He wants Russians apathetic, resigned, fatalistic, until the west is crumbling.

This political project has always been incompatible with wartime mobilization needs, which is why the ‘special operation’ continues to raise manpower through quasi-conscription rather than overt, official means. Russian society has been neutered as a political threat. Prigo was perhaps the only man in Russia with a chance of challenging Putin in next year’s election, and now he is gone.

Of all the recent disappearances, perhaps the most telling is Dmitry Peskov. Three weeks ago, Putin’s spokesman told the New York Times that “our presidential election is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy,” an admission that went too far. Who knows how long he will be in timeout for his tresspass.

Not that I am saying Prigo would have won. had he pressed on towards Moscow, or that he was some sort of dissident. He was a criminal. A liar and dissembler on most days, Prigo did tell inconvenient truths about the war in Ukraine. Arguably, he had no choice but to start an uprising at the time, with prosecutors closing in, but this is not a value judgment of Prigozhin. His chances of pulling off the thunder run to Moscow were low and he could not take control of the state and its security forces with a few thousand Wagner fighters. Occam’s razor suggests that Prigozhin was doomed before the Wagner mutiny began, gave up (‘compromised’) because he calculated the odds, and that his actions since then, such as the Africa trip, were aimed at making the best out of the worst possible situation.

More to the point, the ‘Victor of Bakhmut’ was just about the only Ukraine war ‘hero’ that Russia had left. Name one other prominent, respected fighter still in place. Putin does not want any war heroes to challenge him for the people’s affections. Russian troops are struggling to defend the ‘Surovikin Line’ today; it was named for its architect, who was the most competent commander in Russia. The Wagner mutiny should be seen as a revolt of the capable against the loyal, with incompetents like Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov as the winners.

Watch the recent scenes from Robotyne, Klishchiivka, and Urozhaine, to see what it looks like when Russians are forced to retreat in the open under poor leadership. Those are previews of what battle in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk and Kherson and Crimea will look like, soon.

Reserves are all committed; both sides are all in, in the south. If Putin started clearing out the last male residents of Oshtakov, Siberia and put them in uniform, he could not get them to Zaporizhzhia now, nor could he supply them there. Ukraine has figured out the Surovikin defense plan and adjusted their tactics. Their offensive has not culminated. No responsive adjustment seems to be coming from the Russian side. On the contrary, Moscow continues their pattern of responding to setbacks by punishing Ukrainian civilians with expensive long-range munitions and fighting one another. Russian strategy is getting dumber all the time, by design.

It is no longer possible to argue that something worse than Putin will replace him. There is no replacement. Vladimir Putin has made sure no one in Russia can ever replace him. When he shuffles off his mortal coil things will get worse, yes, but because the system he leaves behind is built to fail.