Putin wants the killing of the Wagner chief to be a show of strength. It may ultimately be a sign of his regime’s decline.
In a final insult, the Russian authorities dismissively placed Prigozhin last on the list of passengers killed, almost as an after-thought.
U.S. President Joe Biden said: “I’m not surprised. There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.” The tension with the defense chiefs — men who are Putin’s choices — took a while to boil over. At points in the Ukraine conflict, Prigozhin’s brutal Wagner mercenaries — with his troops taken from jails — had seemed to be the most effective fighters in Russia’s forces, winning a reputation for savagery and executing deserters with sledgehammers.
Prigozhin had ambitions to become a professional skier — his stepfather was a ski instructor — but abandoned that career after injury and became a fitness trainer at a kids’ sports school before, at the age of 18, being handed a suspended two-year sentence for stealing. He subsequently joined a criminal gang and was sentenced to 12 years in 1980 after choking a woman on the street during a mugging.
Who better, then, to be entrusted with organizing a mercenary group that could be used under the cover of plausible deniability as a tool of Russian foreign policy, supplying troops for unsavory missions not just latterly in Ukraine but in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, providing autocrats with military backing to confront insurgencies.
“If Prigozhin were not forced to pay a heavy price for his rebellion in June, Putin’s regime would have been severely weakened,” said Brian Whitmore of the Center for European Policy Analysis and a former senior Russia analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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