Yevgeny
Prigozhin didn’t fall out of a window; he fell out of the sky. In a terrifying nosedive, from 28,000
feet. I hope he had just enough time left
to know who ordered it. And just for
shuffles and grins, they took out Dmitri Utkin too, the guy who gave Wagner its
name, after his callsign. Few people,
inside Russia
or out, are in any doubt that Putin pulled the trigger. The Kremlin issued a denial, but that’s what
plausible deniability is all about, a smooth lie and a sly wink. The point of the exercise is its utter
shamelessness.
Putin
eulogized his onetime best bud as “a man of difficult fate,” which is an
interesting locution. If a literal
translation, we might put a different construction on it, someone who sailed
under a troubled star. They went back a
ways together, to Leningrad
in the late 1990’s, the Boris Yeltsin years, when the oligarchs were raking in
cash, over and under the table, and the siloviki
– current and former members of the defense and security apparat – had both
feet in the trough along with them. This
is what’s come to be known as gangster capitalism, and Vladimir Putin is now the
capo di tutti capi .
Wagner
Group certainly had its uses. Murder for
hire in Syria and central Africa , leveraging gold, oil, and diamond
concessions. It generated high yield at
low risk, even as they
normalized war crimes, terror a common instrument, but Wagner
wasn’t a state actor, at least on paper.
What
seems to be happening now is that they’re being brought under discipline , specifically the central military
intelligence chain of command. There’s of
course a lot of intentional confusion about Progizhin’s death and who authorized
it, but reliable indicators suggest the job was assigned to Gen. Andrei Averyanov’s
special purpose unit inside GRU. This is
the crew that went after defector Sergei Skripal in the UK , with a
nerve agent, five years ago. They’ve
never been known for subtlety. And as
luck would have it, Gen. Averyanov has reportedly now been given command of
Wagner’s Africa mission.
On a
different front, in what we can consider the Russian asymmetrical war effort,
Prigozhin was also the founding partner
of the Internet Research Agency, the Leningrad
troll farm best known in the U.S. for social media influence operations to promote
Trump for president. IRA is supposedly
being dismantled in the wake of the Prigozhin mutiny,
but we can be sure its assets will be repurposed.
In
other words, although the Wagner coup attempt was widely heralded
by Kremlin-watchers as seismic, an exposure of Putin’s fatal weaknesses, it
seems more like a fart in the bathtub.
Nothing much has really changed. “Death
is our business,” Wagner’s recruiting pitch went, “and business is good.” Is it ever.
Putin’s
murderous war in Ukraine
grinds on, and Russia ’s
weakness makes it even more dangerous, like a wounded animal in a trap. The disinformation campaigns are being redoubled
(with China
slipstreaming alongside), and God help us, we’ve got Trump taking up all the air
in the room, again . If anything, Putin is stronger than he was before
Prigozhin’s mutiny. No amount of wishful
thinking can make this go away.
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