Russia’s Murderous Mercenary Prigozhin Is Dead

Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was reportedly killed on Wednesday when his private jet crashed, killing all 10 people on board, according to reports in Russian state media. Prigozhin, head of the paramilitary Wagner Group, was on the passenger manifest of the plane that went down in the Tver region north of Moscow, Russia’s federal air transport agency confirmed in a message on the social networking app Telegram.

Russia’s aviation agency did not provide a cause for the crash, though some Wagner-flagged Telegram accounts blamed Russian air defenses for shooting down the Embraer jet. His reported death comes exactly two months after the Wagner Group spearheaded an armed rebellion against the Russian Armed Forces, and indirectly against Russian President Vladimir Putin, seizing control of a Russian military office in the city of Rostov-on-Don and making a brief attempt to march on Moscow.

Wagner’s second-in-command, Dmitry Utkin, the SS-tattooed commander, was also believed to be on the plane. It comes just two days after Prigozhin released a video statement indicating the Wagner Group would focus on Africa, where the paramilitary organization has been accused of committing crimes against humanity.

Prigozhin’s demise comes as little surprise to Russia analysts or Western officials. Those who challenge the Kremlin have routinely met untimely deaths. “We have seen the reports. If confirmed, no one should be surprised,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday. In July, U.S. President Joe Biden joked, “If I were he, I’d be careful what I ate.”

The crash came the same day that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, commander of the Russian aerospace forces, was dismissed from his post in what appeared to be a carefully choreographed purge of those associated with the mutiny. Surovikin, who was close to the Wagner Group, had not been seen in public since the Wagner rebellion in June.

The Wagner Group has played a significant role in the Russian war in Ukraine. Its shadow army, some recruited directly from prison, has spearheaded some of the bloodiest battles in the conflict, including the monthslong fight to capture Bakhmut, where thousands died. Putin has said that the Russian state paid Wagner almost $1 billion in the first year of the full-scale war.

“One of the big mysteries of Prigozhin’s mutiny and its aftermath was ‘why is he still alive?’” said Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an expert on the Wagner Group’s activities in the Middle East.

Born in Putin’s hometown of Saint Petersburg in 1961, Prigozhin spent the last years of the Soviet Union in prison on a range of charges including robbery and assault, before being released in 1990. Amid the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which saw millions of Russians plunged into poverty, he became a hot dog vendor before expanding into the restaurant business, when he crossed paths with Putin, who at the time worked in municipal government.

Wagner—the name reportedly an homage to Hitler’s favorite composer—was founded in 2014 by Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence operative, and aided Russian forces in seizing the Crimean Peninsula and in fomenting separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. Reportedly bankrolled by Prigozhin and closely aligned with the Russian state, the Wagner Group served as a mercenary force working for the Kremlin’s interests in Syria and Africa, while offering Russian officials a veneer of plausible deniability for its destabilization operations abroad.

For years, Prigozhin denied any connection to the group, going so far as to sue journalists who tied him to the organization, before doing an about-face last year, very publicly taking ownership of the group and criticizing the Russian Ministry of Defense over the war in Ukraine. “All of a sudden, it was like a switch was pulled,” said Candace Rondeaux, senior director for the Future Frontlines program at the think tank New America.

A singular figure within Russia, with a flair for the dramatic, Prigozhin invested most heavily in information operations, Rondeaux said. Serving as a kind of fixer for the Kremlin, he also spearheaded the so-called troll factory that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Even after Prigozhin’s attempted putsch, the Kremlin tried to project continuity. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned to Africa after the mutiny, telling governments in the region that the Wagner Group’s role would stay the same. While it is the most prominent, Wagner is not the only private military contractor in Russia, and Prigozhin’s death is unlikely to spell the end of the Kremlin’s reliance on such groups.

“The Wagner Group brand has expired, but the operations of Russia’s paramilitary forces will continue and, most importantly, they will continue to shape shift,” Rondeaux said.

U.S. intelligence officials already believed that Wagner’s operations in Africa had likely been disrupted after the Discord leaks of classified Pentagon documents earlier this year assessed the Russian paramilitary force would try to put mercenaries in Chad following its coup in 2021. But Wagner continued business as usual. And though experts believe that the Kremlin has invested too much into the Wagner Group to fully disband it, tensions continued to bubble up between Putin and Prigozhin, who continued his criticism of the Kremlin war effort.

Prigozhin and those who supported him were the uberhawks in Russia’s bogged-down war in Ukraine. His seeming demise at Putin’s hands leaves the Kremlin in a bit of a political predicament, risking alienating some of the more influential pro-war voices in Russian society.

“This is a risk, because he represents very much the very pro-war segment of the population,” said John Lechner, a Washington-based researcher who is writing a book about the Wagner Group and is in touch with some of its members. “It’ll be interesting to see how the Kremlin navigates prosecuting a war while alienating its most pro-war factions within society.”