With Prigozhin’s death, Putin projects a message of power

Just as the news broke Wednesday of the presumed death of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, President Vladimir Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a dark stage lit dramatically in red.

He held a moment of silence, flanked by service members in dress uniforms, while a metronome’s beats sounded, like the slow ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.

The eerie split screen — the reported fiery demise of the man who launched an armed rebellion in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s military might — may have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and power that Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, appears more determined than ever to project.

Prigozhin may have been 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 U.S. presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East.

But with his June rebellion, Prigozhin threatened something even more sensitive: Putin’s own hold on power. After the crash of Prigozhin’s plane Wednesday, the Kremlin appears to be sending the message that no degree of effectiveness and achievement can protect someone from punishment for violating Putin’s loyalty.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, said of the reaction among the Russian elite to the plane crash Wednesday that Western officials theorize was caused by an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”

Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.

“This is a rather harsh precedent,” Vinogradov said, adding that the Kremlin appeared to be doing little to dissuade Russians of the view that it had sanctioned Prigozhin’s killing. After all, if members of the ruling elite concluded that one of the Putin system’s most powerful players had been killed against the Kremlin’s wishes, it would send a devastating signal of Putin’s loss of control.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Friday that the suggestion by foreign officials that the Kremlin was behind Prigozhin’s death was an “absolute lie.”

To some, the fact that Prigozhin was able to survive for two months after staging his rebellion was more surprising than the crash of his private jet. In an address to the nation on June 24, as Prigozhin’s forces were marching on Moscow and already in control of a city of a million people in Russia’s southwest, Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”

And betrayal, Putin has said previously, is the one act that cannot be forgiven. So when Putin appeared to strike a deal with Prigozhin allowing him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as a sign of the president losing control.

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