PRIGOZHIN MAY BE GONE BUT HIS GRIM WORK LIVES ON / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

Prigozhin may be gone but his grim work lives on

Paramilitary groups will continue to thrive after the warlord’s fiery fall from grace

Candace Rondeaux

© Rory Griffiths/FT/Getty Images

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ferocious shadow army changed the course of Russian history. 

Few narratives have been as enigmatic as the story of how a convicted criminal turned catering magnate built the Wagner group into a brand to be reckoned with across the globe. 

But the plane crash that killed Prigozhin and nine others this week is proof positive that the more undeniable the Wagner group’s unhinged brutality became, the more president Vladimir Putin viewed Prigozhin as a liability.

Even before founding his paramilitary cartel in 2014, Prigozhin’s career was intertwined with Kremlin intrigue and subterfuge. 

After his interference in the 2016 US presidential election became known, his name conjured images of clandestine operations, covert influence campaigns and the blurred lines between the Russian state and Putin’s personalised politics.

It is no surprise, then, that mystery shrouds how Prigozhin met his end. 

How did the plane explode? 

Was a bomb hidden on board? 

We may never find out, but everyone knew that this day would come. 

Prigozhin, the vassal, had humiliated his liege, Putin, when he called a spade a spade in June, then marched on Moscow. 

The Wagner rebellion could not go unpunished for long.

An insidious assault on information is the hallmark of Putin’s decades-long unwavering grip on Russia. 

With disinformation campaigns, propaganda machinery and media censorship as instruments of control, silencing the Kremlin’s critics — even the loyal ones — becomes a regular necessity. 

Prigozhin’s connection to Putin gained significance as a symbol of the regime’s modus operandi: a blurring of lines between state-sanctioned actions and private interests that thrives on ambiguity and subversion.

In Africa and the Middle East, it was obvious that Dmitry Utkin, the paramilitary’s operational commander who is also thought to have died in the crash, was comfortable with wasting the lives of thousands who did not look or sound like them. 

Wagner forces under Utkin’s command did not shrink from marking the path of their destruction with the kolovrat, the Slavic version of the swastika. 

They once even carved the name of their unit into the torso of a Syrian man that they had tortured, dismembered and burnt on camera.

Yet the spell of spin Prigozhin helped Putin cast may not last forever. 

In Ukraine, anguished voices rang with bitter clarity as thousands mouldered in the trenches. 

The horrors and human cost of the Wagner group’s geopolitical manoeuvres were suddenly laid bare to the world in Donbas. 

Meanwhile Prigozhin was clearly jolted by the stark realities of what Putin’s fascist fables meant for his own troops in terms of resources and success. 

Instead of the pan-Slavic Valhalla that Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” was meant to resurrect in the name of an imperial St Petersburg, there was only a hollowed-out Russian idea of a united Eurasia standing against the liberal west.

By publicly declaring Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine a sham earlier this summer, Prigozhin pointedly called out the fiction that the conflict could be fought without devastating battlefield losses. 

The Wagner group’s months-long slog in Bakhmut — the bloody human wave attacks, the shell hunger, fields full of corpses — all underscored the fact that Putin was lying when he told the Russian people that there would be no need for full-scale mobilisation of all of the country’s resources to win.

Now, as we no longer wait for the axe of vengeance to fall, many wonder about the next chapter. 

Will there be retribution from any Wagner fighters brave enough to challenge Putin’s regime? 

This seems doubtful, at least in the near term. 

Wagner commanders who have not already knuckled under and joined the group’s paramilitary competitor, Redut, will either seek to do so now or be highly incentivised to disappear.

But while the Wagner brand may fade, others will supplant it. 

For as long as Putin is in power and his forces in disarray, irregular paramilitaries will remain a crutch for a regime crippled by sanctions and corroded by corruption. 

We can count on Russia’s GRU military intelligence wing remaining committed to deploying more of their ilk. 

The regime needs the ill-gotten gains of resource extraction in Africa to survive. Prigozhin may be dead, but his legacy lives on there. 

The warlord’s fiery fall from grace is also living proof that Putin’s assault on the truth will continue unabated until his time in office ends. 

The writer is a professor at Arizona State University and director of the Future Frontlines programme at the New America think-tank. She is writing a book on the hidden history of the Wagner group