With Prigozhin’s Death, Putin Projects a Message of Power

Just because the news broke on Wednesday of the presumed demise of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a darkish stage lit dramatically in purple.

He held a second of silence, flanked by service members in gown uniforms, whereas a metronome’s beats sounded, just like the gradual ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.

The eerie cut up display screen — the reported fiery demise of the person who launched an armed riot in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s army would possibly — could have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and energy that Mr. Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, seems extra decided than ever to challenge.

Mr. Prigozhin could have been brutally efficient, throwing tens of 1000’s of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in jap Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces within the course of and hobbling Kyiv’s skill to stage a counteroffensive. His web “troll farm” helped the Kremlin intrude within the 2016 American presidential election, whereas his mercenary empire helped Russia exert affect throughout Africa and the Middle East.

But along with his June riot, Mr. Prigozhin threatened one thing much more delicate: Mr. Putin’s personal maintain on energy. After the crash of Mr. Prigozhin’s airplane on Wednesday, the Kremlin seems to be sending the message that no diploma of effectiveness and achievement can defend somebody from punishment for violating Mr. Putin’s loyalty.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, stated of the response among the many Russian elite to the airplane crash Wednesday that Western officers theorize was brought on by an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”

Never earlier than has somebody so central to Russia’s ruling institution been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, stated Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.

“This is a rather harsh precedent,” Mr. Vinogradov stated, including that the Kremlin seemed to be doing little to dissuade Russians of the view that it had sanctioned Mr. Prigozhin’s killing. After all, if members of the ruling elite concluded that one of many Putin system’s strongest gamers had been killed in opposition to the Kremlin’s needs, it might ship a devastating sign of Mr. Putin’s lack of management.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, stated on Friday that the suggestion by international officers that the Kremlin was behind Mr. Prigozhin’s demise was an “absolute lie.”

To some, the truth that Mr. Prigozhin was capable of survive for 2 months after staging his riot was extra shocking than the crash of his personal jet. In an deal with to the nation on June 24, as Mr. Prigozhin’s forces had been marching on Moscow and already in charge of a metropolis of one million folks in Russia’s southwest, Mr. Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”

And betrayal, Mr. Putin has stated beforehand, is the one act that can not be forgiven. So when Mr. Putin appeared to strike a cope with Mr. Prigozhin permitting him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as an indication of the president dropping management. The view was magnified when pictures surfaced of Mr. Prigozhin assembly with African officers on the sidelines of Mr. Putin’s marquee summit with African leaders in St. Petersburg in July.

“After he ‘forgave’ Prigozhin, it was understood by those around him as weakness,” stated Aleksei A. Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station earlier than the Kremlin shut it down final yr.

Mr. Venediktov, in an interview in Moscow on Thursday, argued that Mr. Prigozhin’s obvious demise had strengthened Mr. Putin’s dominance within the Russian political system after the chaos of the riot. Now, “Putin has shown his elite,” Mr. Venediktov went on, that “any betrayal will be found out.”

U.S. officers are more and more sure that Mr. Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Mr. Putin ordered the assassination. But relating to the facility dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether or not Mr. Putin personally ordered the assault could also be irrelevant: What issues is that Mr. Prigozhin suffered a violent demise after Mr. Putin publicly condemned him.

“He called him a traitor,” Mr. Remchukov stated. “And that was enough for everyone to see that this person is no longer invulnerable.”

When Mr. Putin broke his silence in regards to the airplane crash on Thursday, some 24 hours after it occurred, he described Mr. Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Mr. Putin revealed that his private ties with Mr. Prigozhin dated again to the early Nineties, and he acknowledged for the primary time that he had personally requested Mr. Prigozhin to hold out duties on his behalf.

“He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results, for himself and, when I asked him about it, for our common cause,” Mr. Putin stated.

Mr. Prigozhin had lengthy been suspected of performing within the shadows in Mr. Putin’s curiosity whereas giving the Kremlin believable deniability. His forces deployed to jap Ukraine in 2014, again when Mr. Putin was stoking a separatist struggle there whereas insisting he had nothing to do with it. In 2016, Mr. Prigozhin’s web “troll farm” intervened in American politics as a part of the Kremlin’s try to swing the presidential election to Donald J. Trump.

But what Mr. Putin left unsaid in his temporary eulogy of Mr. Prigozhin was that by turning in opposition to the Russian president after many years of devoted service, Mr. Prigozhin could have signed his personal demise sentence.

On Friday, one other longtime confidant of Mr. Putin, Aleksei Dyumin, issued an announcement that made the message a bit of clearer. Mr. Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Mr. Putin who’s now the governor of a area south of Moscow, stated he had recognized Mr. Prigozhin “as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless man.” He stated he mourned the crash’s victims and all Wagner fighters who had died in Ukraine, and added: “You can forgive mistakes and even cowardice, but never betrayal. They were not traitors.”

The obvious subtext was that Mr. Prigozhin’s troopers and commanders had been loyal males worthy of respect. But it additionally hinted on the notion that if Mr. Prigozhin himself was a traitor — as Mr. Putin had stated — then he could have deserved his demise.

But Mr. Prigozhin’s demise additionally carries dangers for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one in every of Russia’s simplest and brutal combating forces, exacting and taking huge casualties within the monthslong battle for the Ukrainian metropolis of Bakhmut.

In Africa, the place Mr. Prigozhin constructed a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in international locations like Mali and the Central African Republic, it’s removed from clear whether or not Wagner will be capable to retain its footprint. Wagner’s prime army commander, Dmitri V. Utkin, was listed as a passenger alongside Mr. Prigozhin on the airplane that crashed, in accordance with the Russian authorities.

Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr. Putin who’s now a political guide primarily based in Israel, stated the Kremlin was almost definitely behind the airplane crash, and he argued that the dangerous choice to kill Mr. Prigozhin with a view to ship a sign of deterrence revealed the president’s fears of dropping energy.

“To send this signal, Putin decided to risk a bunch of projects,” Mr. Gallyamov wrote on social media. “This is important for understanding what his priorities are right now: maintaining power, not external expansion.”

Mr. Putin has additionally lengthy made it clear that he sees his private pursuits as inextricable from these of the Russian state. “He believes that if something is important for keeping him in power, then all other concerns are secondary,” stated Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science on the European University at St. Petersburg.

It’s a philosophy that Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s decrease home of Parliament, summed up merely earlier this yr: “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia.”