I started reading the anti-Putin Moscow Times when I was in Moscow a few years ago. They got more and more anti-Putin and they are now based in Amsterdam. I still turn to them for news about Russia. Yesterday, they summed up what happened to mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on Wednesday. As you know, a plane carrying him and 9 others exploded and crashed northwest of Moscow, “exactly two months after he and his mercenary outfit launched a failed coup against Russia’s military leadership.” Let me interrupt their narrative for a moment and note that a flight attendant who was on board when it crashed had phoned relatives to say the flight was delayed due to some “strange” repairs. Kristina Raspopova “said the Embraer jet had been taken away for some kind of ‘incomprehensible’ servicing or repairs ahead of the flight.”
OK, back to the Moscow Times report:
An Embraer Legacy 600 private jet dropped off radar screens near the village of Kuzhenkino in Russia’s Tver region, northwest of Moscow, at 6.20 p.m. local time on Wednesday. It was traveling from the Russian capital to St. Petersburg.
The plane has been linked to Prigozhin and was sanctioned by the United States in 2019.
Videos circulated on social media showed the plane in free fall spinning to the ground with a trail of light smoke behind it. Upon hitting the ground nose-first, the fuselage caught fire and started billowing dark smoke into the air.
There was “no indication that there was anything wrong with this aircraft,” prior to the rapid descent at the end of the flight, Ian Petchenik of Flightradar24 said. He told Reuters the erratic climb in altitude could have been as the crew were “wrestling” with whatever problem they had encountered mid-air.
Prigozhin had returned from Africa on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in televised remarks on Thursday evening, and had held meetings with some officials in Moscow, without specifying who, with or the nature of the discussions. Russian Telegram channels had previously reported Prigozhin and his team had met with defense ministry officials.
What don’t we know about the crash?
Russian authorities have not officially commented on the possible causes of the crash. Putin made his first comments around 7.00 p.m. on Thursday— a full 24 hours after the jet crashed— sending condolences to the families of those who perished and hailing Prigozhin as a “talented businessman” who had “made some serious mistakes in his life.”
Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case into the violation of traffic safety rules and is investigating the crash. A representative told the RBC business news site it had not ruled out any possible explanations, ranging from pilot error or technical malfunction to “external influence.”
Investigators continued to search for the jet’s black box on Thursday. Poor weather overnight had delayed the work of forensic teams on site, state broadcaster Rossiya-24 reported.
None of the victims have yet been formally identified. The bodies that were recovered from the crash site were taken to a morgue in the city of Tver on Thursday morning, according to Russian journalists on the scene.
The injuries were too severe to allow for visual identification of the victims, the Fontanka news outlet reported from the crash site. Biological material collected at the site had been sent to Moscow for forensic analysis, according to the Baza Telegram channel, which is purported to have links to Russian law enforcement.
What could have caused the crash?
Prigozhin’s fate has been the subject of intense debates after he led the June 23-24 rebellion to topple Russia’s military leadership.
Putin said the coup plotters would “inevitably be punished,” but Prigozhin had appeared free to travel around Russia, despite a supposed deal struck with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko to relocate to Belarus following the mutiny.
Immediate speculation across Russian social media and among figures close to the Wagner group has centered on two possible explanations for the crash: an explosive device on board, or a purposeful shoot-down by anti-aircraft missiles.
There can be no doubt that Putin had him killed— spectacularly killed, to send a clear message. As Trump said at a Georgia MAGA rally last year, “The smartest one gets to the top. That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart. And I actually thought he was going to be negotiating. I said, ‘That’s a hell of a way to negotiate, put 200,000 soldiers on the border.’” Earlier, speaking about the invasion of Ukraine, Trump had said, “This is genius… Oh, that’s wonderful!” Trump has been praising Trump for years. And now the whole GOP does. During the debate on Wednesday night Ramaswamy’s statement on Ukraine sounded like it was written by Putin’s press secretary.
In his televised press comments yesterday, Putin said that “First of all I want to express words of sincere condolences to the families of all the victims… I knew Prigozhin for a very long time, since the early 90s. He was a man of complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in his life, but he achieved the right results.” He said that an investigation had been launched into the crash, and that “it will take some time…It will be conducted in full and brought to a conclusion. There is no doubt about that.”
This morning's NY Times explained what Putin meant when he said "achieved results." He was "brutally effective, throwing tens of thousands of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces in the process and hobbling Kyiv’s ability to stage a counteroffensive. His internet “troll farm” helped the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 American presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East... In 2016, Mr. Prigozhin’s internet “troll farm” intervened in American politics as part of the Kremlin’s attempt to swing the presidential election to President Donald J. Trump."
The Wall Street Journal reported that early assessment by U.S. intelligence concludes the crash was an assassination. “The preliminary U.S. government assessments, which officials stressed are incomplete, suggest that a bomb exploded on the aircraft or that some other form of sabotage caused the crash northwest of Moscow.” No doubt— and Tom Nichols was lest tentative, dubbing it a very public execution, sending “an unmistakable message.”
On Wednesday, Nichols wrote that “the sight of Prigozhin’s jet falling out of the sky suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin has conducted a public execution of a man who was once a trusted friend but later provided the greatest challenge that the Russian dictator has ever faced… This is functionally the end of the Wagner Group, which has been among the most effective Russian fighting units in Ukraine. But killing Prigozhin and his lieutenants makes sense, at least according to the Mafia logic that governs Putin’s Kremlin. Prigozhin not only threatened Putin’s authority; he humiliated him. During Prigozhin’s ragged rebellion, Putin was visibly furious, but he soon agreed to meet Prigozhin for a discussion in Moscow. For a gangster boss like Putin, having to meet with the man who betrayed him must have been intolerable: The Russian president has reportedly ordered people killed for far less than marching on the capital. If the plane crash was an execution, however, plenty of questions remain. Why now? And why in Russia? There are several indications that this was not a random aviation accident, but a signature move by the Putin regime to remind Russians, and especially Russia’s elites, that no one survives opposing the Kremlin’s master.”
The timing issue may not be all that puzzling. (Why Prigozhin risked being in Russia at all is a larger mystery, but he is, or was, legendarily arrogant.) Although many in both Russia and the West expected Putin to move against Prigozhin almost immediately after the Wagner rebellion last June, his patience may reflect his insecurity. Prigozhin’s almost effortless success in occupying the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and the ease with which he marched thousands of men to within some 200 miles of the capital, must have enraged and terrified Putin. The Russian president has probably spent weeks huddled with his most trusted security and military subordinates trying to figure out exactly who knew what about Prigozhin’s plans.
Rooting out a conspiracy takes time; so does planning a murder. The initial deal between the Kremlin and Prigozhin, brokered by Belarusian President (and Putin crony) Aleksandr Lukashenko, allowed Prigozhin and his men to leave Russia and take shelter in Belarus. But because of that deal, Putin couldn’t kill Prigozhin in Belarus without making a fool of Lukashenko. Likewise, although Prigozhin traveled in dangerous areas— yesterday, he released a video of himself in which he claimed to be in the Sahel— killing him far from home in a place such as Africa might have left some doubt about how he died, or whether he died at all.
Blowing up a plane flying out of Moscow two months to the day after Prigozhin’s rebellion ended, however, sends an unambiguous message… If Putin wanted to send a message that Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu was still in favor and that Prigozhin had to pay for his insolence, this was a clear way to do it.
Taking down a business jet is also a message to Russia’s elites, who rely heavily on private aviation to get around the country. If Putin is willing to reach out and kill Prigozhin in broad daylight over Russia, no one is safe. (Recall as well that Putin himself is reported to be jumpy about flying; he travels around Russia in a special train, much like Stalin did in his day.)
One other event in particular suggests a link to Shoigu in this regard: The same day that Prigozhin’s plane went down, two Russian outlets reported that General Sergei Surovikin had been removed from his post as the commander of Russian aerospace forces. Surovikin, nicknamed General Armageddon, was one of the few competent Russian field commanders in Ukraine, but like a series of other Russian generals, he was scapegoated for Russia’s poor military performance and relieved of command. When Prigozhin began his march, Surovikin made what looked very much like a coerced appearance in a video, with a gun in his lap, asking the mutineers to stand down. Rumors flew in Moscow that he knew of Prigozhin’s plans and supported them; he was soon detained (“resting,” according to a Russian official) and disappeared from public view.
If Prigozhin’s plot was aimed at Shoigu with Surovikin’s connivance, then destroying his jet in flight using aerospace assets that might have once been under Surovikin’s command is like throwing a Defense Ministry calling card on the burning bodies. Shoigu might be hated, and Surovikin might have been respected, but— again, to put this in a Mafia context— no one takes a shot at an underboss without permission.
As Ian Fleming’s villain Goldfinger warned James Bond: Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action. It’s possible that Prigozhin’s jet suffered a random mishap. It’s possible that the mishap took place exactly two months to the day after Prigozhin’s mutiny. It’s possible that the head of Russia’s air force was relieved at the same time that all this took place. But that’s a hell of a lot of coincidences, especially in a country where few things of importance happen without direction from Red Square.
Prigozhin has almost certainly been living on borrowed time since last June. But if he is dead in today’s crash, Vladimir Putin has taken his revenge in spectacular fashion. Still to be determined, however, is whether another murder will be enough to quell the growing instability in the streets, boardrooms, and barracks of Russia.
Anne Applebaum doesn’t think so. She expects a lot more spectacular violence— and she tends too know more about goings on in Russia than anyone who write about it in English. “Putin’s Russia,” she wrote hours after the plane crashed, “has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the stairwell of her apartment building in Moscow. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin’s presidency, was killed by an assassin only steps away from the Kremlin. Other critics barely survived. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, organizer of the only truly national anti-Putin political movement, fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow after being poisoned.”
“All of these victims,” she wrote, “were Putin’s formal opponents, people who spoke or wrote in opposition to the kleptocracy he built. Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a different class of victims— members of the Russian business elite who were perhaps insufficiently loyal or insufficiently keen on the war— have also begun to die in strange circumstances. In the year and a half that has passed since February 2022, two gas-industry executives were found dead with suicide notes. Three Russian executives were killed, alongside their wives and children, in what appeared to be murder-suicides. The body of the owner of a resort in Sochi was discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Another executive was found floating in a pool in St. Petersburg. Others have fallen out of windows or down staircases in Moscow, India, the French Riviera and Washington DC. Still, even on the very long list of people who have been shot, hanged, poisoned, or subjected to lethal accidents because they somehow got in Putin’s way, Yevgeny Prigozhin stands out.”
[Y]es, this is another mysterious death, but it is a new kind of mysterious death. With this plane crash, the violence on the periphery of Russia’s empire has now migrated to its very heart. Putin’s rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory.
He may soon need a lot more of it. There is no mutual trust among Russia’s elite, no true shared ideology beyond self-interest, and no wonder: Prigozhin’s safety, and the safety of his mercenaries, was supposed to be guaranteed by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. That promise, like most of Putin’s promises, turned out to be empty. Everyone who is still part of the inner circle already hires bodyguards and, if they can, sends their family abroad. Those who can afford it already have private armies. Anyone associated with Prigozhin now has new reasons to fear for their safety too. One general close to Prigozhin was relieved of his command today. He had not been seen in public for many weeks. Prigozhin’s deputy, Dmitry Utkin, died today on the plane along with him.
But many others in Moscow knew Prigozhin, worked with Prigozhin, and benefited from Prigozhin’s businesses, military and criminal. Will they wait passively for violence to consume them? Will they escape— there were reports earlier this week that Wagner troops were already leaving their newly built camps in Belarus— or will they try to strike first? “Grey Zone,” a Telegram channel associated with the Wagner Group, has already made this threat explicit: “The assassination of Prigozhin will have catastrophic consequences,” one posting today declared. “The people who gave the order do not understand the mood in the army and morale at all. Let this be a lesson to all. You always have to go to the end.”
By “the end” the author means Moscow. Prigozhin didn’t go to Moscow. Maybe somebody else now will.
I’m not comparing Putin to Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime and Punishment, but I have no doubt that Putin read Dostoevsky’s literary masterpiece. At the beginning of the book, Raskolnikov, then around 23, commits a gruesome double murder in St Petersburg, with the belief that he is a "superior" individual who is exempt from conventional moral rules. He killed an elderly pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanovna because he believes her to be a malicious and exploitative woman who preys on the poor and downtrodden, a symbol of the oppressive social system that perpetuates poverty and suffering. He also kills her half-sister, Lizaveta Ivanovna, who unexpectedly enters the apartment. The murders are central to the rest of the novel and drive much of the psychological and moral conflict that Raskolnikov experiences throughout the story. He rationalizes his actions as a means to achieve a higher purpose and believes he has the right to commit murder for the sake of his ideas or ideals. However, afterwards he experiences intense guilt, anxiety, psychological turmoil and becomes increasingly paranoid and haunted by his crime. The weight of his guilt causes him to isolate himself from others and spiral into a state of inner torment. OK, so I’m comparing him a little to Putin.
Raskolnikov's internal struggle intensifies as he interacts with various characters affected by his crime, witnessing the suffering of others due to his actions. He starts to question his own justifications and starts to realize that his theories about the ‘extraordinary man’ and his right to commit murder were misguided and he confesses and is taken into custody and put on trial, which Dostoevsky uses as a vehicle to explore themes of justice, morality, and the consequences of one's actions. During the trial, he examines Raskolnikov's internal struggles and psychological state. Raskolnikov gradually realizes the gravity of his crime and begins to come to terms with the fact that he is not the extraordinary person he had deluded himself into believing. He recognizes the horror of his actions and the pain he has caused to others and ultimately Dostoevsky uses the confession as a crucial step toward Raskolnikov’s redemption and moral awakening— grappling with his guilt, seeking atonement and striving for personal and spiritual growth.
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