Prigozhin’s Assassination Was Business, Not Revenge

When Wagner mercenary group leader, caterer, and convicted robber Yevgeny Prigozhin met his fiery death alongside other Wagner leaders 30 miles southeast of Valdai, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite lakefront residence, most assumed that it was the Russian president’s long-awaited revenge for Prigozhin’s failed mutiny this summer. But real reasons for what was almost certainly an assassination, and the implications of the killing for regime stability, are likely quite different.

The idea that this was revenge is tempting, given that Prigozhin’s mutiny, even if it rapidly disintegrated, seemed like a humiliation for Putin. But look at events since then, and it doesn’t add up. Revenge motive is inconsistent with Putin’s apparent forgiveness of Prigozhin in the strange deal struck in June, when in return for amnesty, the mutineer agreed to pull back his armored column marching on Moscow, disarm his troops, and go into exile to Belarus. Instead, judging by the flight records of Prigozhin’s private jet and in-person sightings all over St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Africa, he had done everything but set up residence in a Minsk villa.

Prigozhin and Putin both rose to wealth and power in the tumultuous and chaotic 1990s. That was the time of razborki—gangland confrontations, where disputes over the spoils of power would be resolved in a montage of violence. Bombings and contract shootings of oligarchs, rival businessmen, politicians, and organized crime figures were a regular occurrence on the streets of Russia’s major cities. Being a rich man in Russia was an inherently risky and deadly business.

Part of Putin’s appeal to Russia’s elite, whether they were criminals, businessmen, or politicians, was that he ended, or at least capped, that violence. Indeed, as of 2021, the homicide rate in Russia had dropped nearly 76 percent since the start of Putin’s tenure. Disputes could be resolved nonlethally by the system established by Putin, not by bullets fired into a limousine. Enemies of the regime, such as journalists, were fair game, but the gangsters who held power, officially or otherwise, were protected. In the aftermath of his failed mutiny, Prigozhin was offered a chance to keep playing by those rules; his refusal, and his brutal end, may mean a return to the era of bloody contestation.

Far from being ostracized by Russia’s president, by Putin’s own account, Prigozhin met with him in the Kremlin only a mere week after the armed revolt. In July, Prigozhin posted a photograph of himself attending the Kremlin-organized Africa leaders’ summit in St. Petersburg, where Putin held court with 17 heads of state, hardly an indication of a man on the run from Russian intelligence.

The theory that Russia’s president was simply trying to lull Wagner’s leader into a sense of safety before ordering a bomb to be placed on his plane is also illogical. The Kremlin had numerous opportunities to order Prigozhin’s death during his free-wheeling travels across Russia over the past two months.

To be sure, revenge can be a famously cold dish. But it wasn’t cost-free for Putin to appear to change his mind and revoke his pledges of Prigozhin’s safety. Having failed to destroy Wagner during its “March for Justice” on Moscow—and officials in Kyiv shared information with me indicating that Russian combat pilots had refused to follow orders to fire on the mutineers—Putin acquiesced to a pardon for Prigozhin to end the uprising and publicly guaranteed his safety. Playing into that decision was likely not just a desire to quickly and with limited destruction put an end to this embarrassing episode, but also a belief that Wagner forces—the only ones who have demonstrated ability to conquer Ukrainian territory this year—could prove useful to Kremlin’s imperialist ambitions in the future. The price of the deal was merely a promise to let Prigozhin disappear into obscurity.

While Putin certainly lies routinely to the world community, the press, and the Russian public, doing so to an elite insider in the Russian government’s clannish and mafia-like system is much more consequential. Other security elites and oligarchs might start wondering if they themselves could fall victim to similar deception, and whether Putin’s word could ever be trusted. The unwritten oligarch rule of the Putin era is this: As long as you share the spoils of your gains with officials in power, abide by Kremlin’s wishes in whatever may be asked of you, and don’t engage in unsanctioned political activities, the system will take care of you, provide personal safety, and ensure your continued enrichment. The consequences for Putin of breaking that sacrament could mean the eventual loss of elite’s trust and backing.

Another indication that Prigozhin was not perceived as a traitor who deserved death for his betrayal is the reaction of key members of the Russian elite to his death. Alexey Dumin, a former Putin bodyguard and the current governor of the Tula region and often-mentioned possible successor as minister of defense, declared that Prigozhin was a “true patriot who had done a lot for his country and Motherland will remember him for it,” going even as far as to proclaim about the dead Wagner leaders that “traitors they were not.” Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful head of Chechnya and a Putin loyalist, said that Prigozhin’s death is a “big loss for the nation.” This praise from key Kremlin power elites would be unlikely if Prigozhin had been eliminated for disloyalty.

The reason why Prigozhin could have been earnestly forgiven for his armed uprising is that his actions were not intended to challenge Putin’s position in power. Instead, Prigozhin was protesting—albeit with armored troop columns that shot down multiple helicopters and a command and control aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces—the plan by Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu to dismantle private military companies like Wagner and subsume them under Russian armed forces. Prigozhin’s mutiny was not about replacing the Kremlin’s leader; it was about keeping control of his mercenary troops and the highly lucrative opportunities they afforded him. The entire uprising was effectively a business dispute among Russian elites—one that resulted in murderous mayhem .

The more likely explanation for why Putin ultimately ordered the assassination is that it was Prigozhin, not Putin, who had gone back on their June agreement mediated by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Said or unsaid, it is clear that the penance for Prigozhin’s act of rebellion was the demand for the mutineer to give up much of his vast business empire and allow the Kremlin’s friends to subsume its various parts.

And initially, this went as agreed. Prigozhin shut down his propagandist media organizations—including the infamous Internet Research Agency troll farm, whose interference in U.S. elections had earned Prigozhin an indictment by the Justice Department. He also had his Wagner troops return their heavy arms to the Russian military and reportedly terminated his catering contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense.

But there was one part of his important business interests he was not willing to give up—his security and mining operations in Africa. For nearly a decade, Wagner had been operating across the continent to provide security assistance, training, and occasional coup support (and torture and terror killing campaigns) in Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mozambique, Libya, and Chad. In exchange, Prigozhin locked up for himself valuable mining interests for regional natural resources, such as gold, diamonds, oil, and gas.

On my recent trip to Kyiv, I was informed by Ukrainian government officials that they had information indicating that Prigozhin had accumulated more than $4 billion worth of gold alone from these endeavors. But Putin decided after Wagner’s rebellion that it was time for Prigozhin to give up these mercenary protection rackets—and time for his Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, and other regime-affiliated private military companies such as Redut, to take them over. More reliable members of the security state would be rewarded while Prigozhin was punished.

As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, Putin had personally told the president of Central African Republic that it was time to end his relationship with Prigozhin, and the Russian Ministry of Defense had sent delegations to African strongmen to tell them that from now on they were to deal directly with the Russian government.

But Prigozhin apparently refused to take the hint. Instead, in his last days, he was crisscrossing Africa—going from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Everywhere he went, he insisted—in private meetings and  a video that he later released on his Telegram social media channel—that Wagner would continue to increase its presence and support to these African leaders. To his allied commanders in Sudan, who had brought him gold from Darfur’s Songo mine, the Journal  reported that he said, “I need more gold.”

These defiant actions must have infuriated Putin. In the TV broadcast eulogy after Prigozhin’s death, Putin referred to him as a “talented businessman” who had made “serious mistakes in life,” but he also went into a strange and seemingly out-of-place level of detail on Prigozhin’s business dealings in Africa—the only specific reference to the oligarch’s vast business empire—and his engagement “in oil, gas, precious metals, and stones there.”

From Putin’s perspective, Prigozhin, rather than taking a chance at clemency and disappearing into oblivion, had the arrogance to continue to oppose Putin’s wishes. There could not and would not be a second forgiveness. Once again, Prigozhin arrogantly miscalculated a business dispute with Putin and other Russian elites, and it led to his demise.

Others seem to have made similar mistakes. The strain on the system caused by Putin’s botched invasion of Ukraine has meant an intensification of violence, albeit for most in a less flashy way. With far less money to go around, a growing security paranoia, and the hollowing out of the state grimly exposed by military failures, competition is deadlier that it has been for decades. This year alone, 16 prominent Russian business figures and government officials, in addition to Prigozhin, have perished from causes as varied as falling out of windows, dying days after receiving a cancer diagnosis, traffic accidents, drowning, suicide, and even being burned alive from a fire started by a lit cigarette. Now we can add a plane disintegrating in the sky to that long list.

Razborki and elite infighting are back in Russia after more than 20 years of Putin-enforced stability, and with them comes the increasing likelihood that Russia devolves further and further into chaos, which could one day endanger Putin’s own hold on power.