The leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigojine, which started a rebellion against the Russian general staff in June, was on board a private jet which crashed, Wednesday August 23, in the region from Tver, about 180 kilometers northwest of Moscow. In addition to Yevgeny Prigojine, the aircraft carried, according to Russian civil aviation, his right-hand man, Dmitry Utkin, and other officials of the Wagner Group.
The correspondent of Le Monde in Moscow, Benoît Vitkine, answered your questions during a chat on Friday on the consequences of this event.
No one is suggesting taking official Russian statements at face value, that would obviously be ridiculous. But, conversely, it’s quite difficult to imagine a Vladimir Putin paying a posthumous tribute to Yevgeny Prigojine… before the latter reappears a few days or weeks later.
So, no, no one is claiming to have “proof” of anything, but the elements that support the hypothesis of the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin all respond to a logic, starting with the fact that Vladimir Putin had quite explicitly pronounced his death sentence), while it is difficult to find a logic (or sometimes a feasibility) in the other versions.
Here, it is the question of feasibility that arises first. As for the interests, it is difficult to say: certain Western countries live in perpetual fear of seeing a form of chaos settling in Russia; others were probably not unhappy to see the top of the Russian state being torn apart, and the resources made available to the Ukrainian front dwindling.
Almost none. I remind you that with regard to another file, that of Alexei Navalny, the official conclusions vary from a simple hormonal imbalance to poisoning perpetrated by Western services on Russian soil.
It’s hard to say. We are talking about a man with a particular mode of operation: he is a (former) brigand, who has always advanced in audacity, by making blows. For a year and a half, he lived immersed in the logic of war: that in Ukraine, whose battlefields he really frequented, and that which he had engaged against his enemies in Russia, those of the Ministry of Defense and “the elite”, whom he slew. This is enough to blur some benchmarks.
Then, recent experience shows that he was not completely wrong to be confident. That he was able to agonize over public insults, for months, from ministers and those close to the president, was already a miracle. He had even crossed the line to criticize Vladimir Putin and the reasons that led him to launch the invasion of Ukraine. The mutiny was part of the same gamble.
He may also be counting on his long-standing relationship with Vladimir Putin. Who knows what they said to each other when they saw each other in the Kremlin a few days after the rebellion? Or else he thought himself indispensable, in particular for the conduct of Wagner’s business in Africa. Perhaps he also thought he was protected by files he could have on representatives of power.
Russia, moreover Russia at war, is not stingy with strangeness… What can we conclude?
Since its creation, Wagner has not been a company like the others – it does not even have a legal existence – and even more so since the June mutiny. His hierarchy was well aware of walking on a wire.
If it was only a question of saving his skin, Evgueni Prigojine would not have gone to Mali to shoot videos. He hoped to regain ground, to prove himself useful again.
In the weeks following the rebellion, we could have concluded a sort of draw. Yevgeny Prigozhin, or at least his group, seemed doomed by the military’s ultimatum that Wagner should have merged into the military; rendered useless, he would have become a target. With this gamble that was this “march on Moscow”, he had at least obtained to save his skin.
Second, Vladimir Putin was weakened: the fact that the crisis had escalated so far (to a mutiny) was largely the result of his inaction. His subsequent management then caused a stir: he promised to punish the traitors, then he backed off.
Today, it is obvious that he is strengthening his authority. His message is clear and will be well understood: silence in the ranks. Another character who could claim leadership on the radical and ultranationalist fringe of opinion, Igor Strelkov, was also imprisoned a few weeks ago.
That said, we can also see things a little differently, or in the longer term: first, the state is once again weakened, its institutions once again discredited (a civilian plane is blown up in the Russian sky to do justice…); in the longer term, too, the problems denounced by Yevgeny Prigojine do not disappear. The mass of radicals who find that Vladimir Putin does not go far enough do not disappear either.
It’s all still fresh, and I haven’t really been able to fathom those feelings (an exercise that has become very difficult anyway), but I don’t think there’s a big upheaval.
People were certainly startled when they learned of the disappearance of this extraordinary character, who had become very well known and remained appreciated by part of the public – as much for his reputation as an effective warlord as for his speeches against the elite. .
But even after the aborted mutiny, people were immediately back to business, away from this bizarre and dangerous political world they see as quite outside their lives.
In ultranationalist and radical circles, it is obviously different. The emotion is great. Especially since not many people pretend to believe in an accident, or in a Ukrainian or Western attack…
What dominates in Russian society is confusion. Many people, whatever their social level, are lost, put forward perfectly contradictory arguments, admit that they themselves do not really know what to think…
I have dozens of such examples, but I remember only one, which does not come from my experience or the discussions I may have, but from surveys. These show that the same people who would support the idea of peace negotiations… also support the launching of a new offensive on kyiv.
A lot of questions come up about this, so a quick word: This plane flew back to Moscow, then it left for Azerbaijan. It seems he actually had no connection to Wagner.
We can imagine anything! Wagner’s fighters were incredibly devoted to their leader. As for the detainees, he literally descended from heaven to come and “save” them. He was a man of great charisma, who knew how to talk to the simplest people. His criticisms of the conduct of the war were also heard in wide circles beyond the narrow circle of his combatants.
However, the scenario you describe seems unlikely. There is currently no Wagner armed group formed, apart from the few thousand exiles in Belarus, who do not have much equipment – the heavy weapons have been returned.
The others, those who have returned home or joined the army, are closely watched. Besides, they are (mostly) rational people: the latest developments are there to remind them that the smartest thing to do is to keep a low profile.
This death puts an end to the dangerous wavering created by the mutiny. What conclusions could the population and even more so the members of the elite draw from this? That power is not so solid, that it can topple, that one can be a “traitor”, as Vladimir Putin called Yevgeny Prigojine, and still live. Things are sort of back to normal.
However, I do not claim that this order is unalterable. The Russian system is deeply unbalanced. In 2020, believing to please him, the head of the Duma proclaimed: “Without Putin, no Russia. “What a statement of failure, for a president supposed to have brought his country out of chaos, built a strong state, stable institutions…
But, for now, in these troubled and dangerous times, everyone is thinking about the immediate, even about their survival. Apart from perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, persuaded to lead a crusade that is played out over a very long time, not many people within the Russian elite allow themselves to draw up major projects for the future.
The question is already settled: Wagner no longer exists. Granted, it’s still a very powerful “mark”, which won’t necessarily disappear, and thousands of fighters still identify with this patch, but the militia – as it existed in recent years – has ceased to exist. with the mutiny, and still more with the death of its leader.
The heavy weapons were immediately handed over to the army, and then partly transferred to the National Guard. This is led by Vladimir Putin’s former bodyguard, and the message is pretty clear. There are no more Wagner combat units. The Kremlin had given its soldiers three options: to be demobilized and return home, to be incorporated into the army, or to go into exile in Belarus. Barring new upheavals, the government will no longer allow any paramilitary group to acquire as much autonomy.
The question is a little more complicated when it comes to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s other activities, and this is all the more important since the real strength of this set was its complementarity. Wagner in the Central African Republic is more than men with Kalashnikovs – it is political consultants, controlled media, mining, internet trolls… And each activity reinforces the other.
There have been a lot of movements in the past two months, and almost everything has been liquidated – even completely dissolved, like certain Yevgueni Prigojine media, which have been either closed or taken over by loyal figures. This is undoubtedly done at the cost of a loss of efficiency, but for the Kremlin, it was not the priority.
The tricky part is Africa: that’s where the experience of Wagner’s men, their networks, counts the most. On this ground, I am not able to say how things are or will be reorganized. But Yevgueni Prigojine tried to the end to preserve this part of his business, instead of being wisely forgotten. Remember: he was filmed in Mali, three days before his death. According to some sources, notably in the Washington Post of August 25, this may even have precipitated this probable assassination.
No one is going to replace Yevgeny Prigozhin: why would the Kremlin want to recreate a comparable creature? There are certainly other private militias in Russia, but they absolutely cannot be compared with what Wagner was. For the most part, these are only units linked to large companies or more often to regions. They are formed only because these centers of power (most often regional) receive the order to recruit and equip a certain number of fighters. These groups then do not have the slightest autonomy of action.
You are right to warn me against overly peremptory assertions or predictions. This is also the main lesson of this abortive putsch and its aftermath…
But when I say that Yevgeny Prigozhin will not be replaced or that Wagner no longer exists, I mean that the model that existed has disappeared. We will no longer let a maverick control so many strategic assets and so autonomously. It is in this sense that Wagner or a new Evgueni Prigojine can no longer exist.
This is (probably) the most difficult point for the Russian power, and this is probably also why I find it difficult to answer you.
After the putsch, Yevgeny Prigozhin lost control of all his other activities: his troops, of course; its media, whether closed or resumed; his “legal” restaurant business; its troll factories…
Africa remained: it is no coincidence that he was still in Mali a few days before his assassination and that he published a video there. He wanted to prove that he was still useful, if not indispensable, in the conduct of Wagner’s affairs on this continent.
And that corresponds to a reality: running a troll factory is not complicated – we pay the wages and every morning we post on the board the name of the opponent to be discredited. Directing the activities of Wagner (to keep this generic name) in the Central African Republic or in Mali is more delicate: it is a field that the other actors know little about. In addition to armed mercenaries, there is the work with politicians, with local journalists, etc. The reorganization will therefore not be easy.