Prigozhin’s mysterious death and its implications

Niraj Srivastava

Former Ambassador

IN an opinion piece published in these columns on July 13, this writer had suggested that Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group, was likely to pay a heavy price for leading a mutiny against the Russian authorities on June 23. Prigozhin died under mysterious circumstances along with six of his top lieutenants in a plane crash near Moscow on August 23.

Western observers immediately pointed a finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin, even before an official inquiry into the crash was conducted. However, it is true that Prigozhin had fallen out of favour with the Kremlin for what his troops did on June 23.

Prigozhin began as a small-time criminal, serving almost 10 years in jail for robbery and other crimes. By the time he was freed in 1990, the Soviet Union had started disintegrating. He started selling hot dogs, later opening a restaurant in St Petersburg, which quickly became popular with Russian dignitaries, including Putin. In time, he came close to Putin.

By 1995, Prigozhin had established a network of restaurants. In post-Soviet Russia, there was a lot of scope for making money in the food service industry. Soon, Prigozhin became one of the wealthiest persons in the country. But he became an influential figure only in 2014, when he set up the Wagner Group, a company that supplied mercenaries for hire in operations in Africa and West Asia.

Prigozhin was permitted to recruit soldiers for the group from criminals serving time in Russian prisons. In exchange for fighting in various theatres for six months, the prisoners were freed from the prisons and paid handsomely — if they were still alive!

The group quickly acquired a reputation for tough fighting. There were reports in 2015 that Prigozhin’s soldiers were fighting in eastern Syria, close to the country’s oil and gas fields, which had fallen into the hands of Islamic State and Kurdish soldiers. It was also reported that in exchange for recovering them, Prigozhin had been offered a slice of the revenue generated by the fields.

This pattern was replicated in several other countries, including Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Libya, where Prigozhin’s mercenaries assisted the forces of warlord Khalifa Haftar. In Sudan, Wagner provided security and logistical support to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, receiving exclusive rights for gold mining in the country.

Prigozhin’s soldiers began playing an important role in Ukraine in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea in response to the West-orchestrated coup in the country. Wagner enabled Russia to carry out military operations in support of the ethnic Russian-speaking people of Donetsk and Luhansk with ‘plausible deniability’. Wagner’s success in these operations led to the group’s swift expansion. It became a proxy army for Russia, intervening in places where Russia wanted to intervene, but officially could not.

When Russia decided to invade Ukraine in 2022, Prigozhin and his fighters were at the heart of the Russian operations. Wagner expanded significantly with an influx of convicts. At its peak, it had 50,000 fighters. It was involved in some of the heaviest fighting and suffered massive casualties. In May 2022, the group seized Bakhmut. The adulation that followed might have gone to Prigozhin’s head.

That could have led to Prigozhin breaking the taboos of the Kremlin’s political system by hurling insults at Moscow’s top brass, including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. He criticised Russia’s military leadership for not caring about his troops. In a video released on May 5, he showed dead Wagner fighters, who he said had been killed due to a shortage of munitions, for which he blamed Shoigu and Gerasimov.

Prigozhin’s outbursts were not received well in Moscow. But he compounded his error by leading a column of around 8,000 fighters to Moscow on June 23-24. They reached the town of Rostov-on-Don without much resistance. There, Prigozhin made some statements to the media. His men also shot down two Russian helicopters, killing 12 soldiers. By doing so, however, they committed a cardinal sin, for which Prigozhin could have paid with his life.

Putin addressed the nation, calling Prigozhin a ‘traitor’ and his actions ‘treason’. He told the rebels they would face ‘inevitable punishment’. But, to defuse the crisis and prevent a bloodbath between the Russian army and Wagner fighters, Putin accepted mediation by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, whereby Prigozhin and some of his fighters were exiled to Belarus.

However, it was announced by the Kremlin on June 29 that Prigozhin and some of his commanders had met Putin in Moscow. They discussed the options available for the future deployment of Wagner fighters, which implied that the Kremlin had not ruled out a role for them in the ongoing war in Ukraine, as also elsewhere. But strangely, Prigozhin continued to stay in Russia, despite the deal brokered by Lukashenko.

Even if Wagner continues to fight in Ukraine, it is unlikely that the group will ever regain its earlier autonomy. There are indications that its fighters will be offered private contracts with the Russian Defence Ministry, wherein they will be brought under its direct control. The question whether his death was accidental or caused by sabotage has not yet been answered.

As for Putin, his popularity ratings continue to be high, with over 80 per cent of the people supporting him. The Prigozhin affair does not appear to have affected his position in the Kremlin power structure.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war grinds on, with little prospect of ending soon. Even though Russia has the upper hand and the military capability to end the war swiftly in its favour, it appears reluctant to do so because that could precipitate direct NATO involvement in Ukraine. Moreover, Putin understands that Biden has linked his re-election prospects in 2024 to a victory in Ukraine, and is, therefore, wary of pushing him into a corner.

Thus, an early conclusion of the war appears unlikely. It has become a war of attrition which Russia is better placed to win, with plenty of manpower and weapons. Ukraine is facing a severe shortage of both, which the US and NATO cannot overcome in the foreseeable future.

The longer the war goes on, the greater its consequences will be, particularly for Ukraine, and Europe, which is sliding into a recession. Russia will consolidate its hold on the territory it already occupies and could try to add Odessa to it, further reducing Ukraine’s access to the sea. Despite their rhetoric, the US and Europe appear to have lost this geopolitical gambit, causing a fundamental shift in the global power structure.

America’s ‘unipolar moment’, which began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, appears to be over. Other power centres are emerging, making the world multipolar. As the fastest-growing major economy in the world, India is well-placed to become a power centre if it plays its cards well, especially internally, by increasing its economic strength.

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