Did Putin just kill Prigozhin?

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. He wouldn’t be the first enemy of Vladimir Putin to end up dead. So no wonder suspicion falls on the Russian leader for the apparent demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who staged a short-lived mutiny in Russia back in June.

Russia says the Wagner group leader was on a plane that crashed north of Moscow, leaving no survivors. Today, Rajan Menon from the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities on what we know so far and what it means for Putin’s war and his power. Rajan, let’s just start with the crash. There are conspiracy theories aplenty, but what do we know for sure at this stage?

Rajan Menon: What we do know is that the Russian media reported the Russian Air Travel Authority said that a plane had crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and that on the passenger manifest was Yevgeny Prigozhin. Thereafter, Russian television reported that Prigozhin’s body had been found.

And that’s not completely confirmed, but certainly, at least one station reported that. So we know that there was an Embraer private aircraft. Prigozhin was on board, as well as a man named Dmitry Utkin, who was a senior member of the Wagner group, in effect, almost a co-founder like Prigozhin, and there were ten people altogether, including the crew, and nobody survived.

Sam Hawley: Right. Okay. And I want to talk to you soon about the Wagner group and Prigozhin’s leadership of that. Russian state media agency Ria Novosti posted an unconfirmed video that purports to show the plane tumbling from the sky with smoke billowing from it. So it was quite dramatic, wasn’t it?

Rajan Menon: Correct.

Sam Hawley: And as we mentioned, there were a few conspiracy theories about what happened. Just tell me, what are some of the theories going around?

Rajan Menon: Well, you know, what we know is what I just told you. But you’re going to have a lot of pundits speaking very eloquently with perfect cadence, but very little evidence giving you all kinds of claims, not hypotheses. So one has been that this is all a ruse. Prigozhin and Utkin are savvy characters. They would never travel on the same plane. Prigozhin had many aircraft in the sky at any given point to avoid being shot down.

And this is an attempt by Prigozhin to fake his death. So that’s one claim I’ve heard. Yes. The other is that Putin shot down the aircraft because he’s been gunning, pardon the pun, for Prigozhin. Now, both of these theories are plausible, but I want to be very clear about the limits of what we know because many of the details are not clear to us. And there are lots of speculations that are not grounded in fact.

Sam Hawley: Yes, we’ll talk about speculation. The US president, Joe Biden, was asked if he thought the Russian president was behind the crash and he says there’s not much in Russia that Putin isn’t behind.

Joe Biden, US President: I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised. There’s not much that happens in Russia, that Putin is not behind. I don’t know enough to know the answer.

Rajan Menon: It’s certainly true that President Putin has an enormous amount of power, unrivaled power. I would say. It is also quite clear that. If you’re a political opponent of Putin, you either end up in prison or worse, wind up dead. And the number of people who have experienced one or the other fate is quite long. Yes. So it is plausible to say that Putin wanted Prigozhin out of the way. Now, President Biden may have information that I don’t, but do we, as analysts know that Putin ordered the shooting down of the aircraft? No, because the details are yet very murky. Could he have done so? Yes, absolutely.

Sam Hawley: Yes. Okay. So Prigozhin, as you allude to, would not be the first enemy of Vladimir Putin to meet his ultimate death. Just remind me before you go on. The Wagner Group, is the group, of course, that Prigozhin heads or was heading. And it has had a big role, hasn’t it, in the war in Ukraine? Just explain who are the members of this group. What were they doing?

Rajan Menon: It’s essentially a private army that had various connections with the state for a long time. Prigozhin denied that he had anything to do with it. In September of 2022 last year, he said yes, he had founded the Wagner Group in 2014, when you may remember, Russia annexed Crimea. So he finally owned up to that.

So there’s been the role in 2014. There’s been the role in the current war in Ukraine, but there has also been a gun-for-hire operation by Prigozhin in various parts of Africa and the Middle East, certainly with a wink and a nod from the Russian authorities. I think it’s fair to say that the Wagner group acquitted itself quite well in the war in Ukraine. And although Prigozhin might not have become a hero, he certainly had a kind of battle-tested credibility that Putin, who never visited the front, certainly did not.

Sam Hawley: Okay, Rajan. Now, I want you to take me back to June when mutiny was unfolding in Russia. What was happening?

Rajan Menon: In the months leading up to June? Prigozhin had become a very vociferous critic of the management of the war.

Yevgeny Prigozhin: TRANSLATION: These are someone’s fathers, someone’s sons. Their blood is still fresh because Moscow is starving these fighters of ammunition.

Rajan Menon: He said the war was being mismanaged. He said the Wagner group was being denied weapons. He then escalated and said the Wagner group had been attacked by the Russian military. And then in June, he crossed into a city called Rostov in southern Russia, a city of 1 million. Headquarters of the Southern military district and home to the 50th Combined Arms Army. When he walked into the staff with his armed retinue, no opposition, and then marched up a highway northward and got within 120 miles of Moscow without encountering any resistance, any opposition.

Social media video: There are a lot of Wagner fighters around and a lot of civilians. You can see a tank with a Wagner flag on it behind me.

Rajan Menon: This could not have happened had he not had some form of support within the military and security establishment. It’s quite clear then that his critique of the war resonated within certain parts of the military intelligence complex, shall we say.

Sam Hawley: And it’s thought that General Sergei Surovikin, the Air Force chief, knew that this was going to unfold. And that’s important now, isn’t it? Because he was removed from his position a few days ago?

Rajan Menon: Correct. So Surovikin was at one point the commander of the Russian operation in Ukraine. And if you look at all the fortifications the Russians have built in the south, these are known as the Surovikin lines. And then Surovikin was relieved of his command, Ukrainian operation.

But he then held his post as the head of the aerospace forces. Come June, Surovikin appeared on television clutching a rifle and imploring Prigozhin and his armed group to cease. Soon after, Prigozhin suddenly abruptly halted his march toward Moscow. We had Surovikin disappear for a long time. Now we have the latest information of him having been sacked as head of the Air Force. And shortly after that, we have the death of Mr. Prigozhin. So that’s kind of where we stand.

Sam Hawley: Yes. At the time that Prigozhin was marching towards the capital, Moscow, Vladimir Putin made a televised address promising to crush the armed mutiny and accusing Prigozhin of treason, of stabbing the nation in the back. So Putin was incredibly unhappy.

Vladimir Putin, Russian President: TRANSLATION: Our actions to defend the state against this threat will be harsh. Those who consciously choose treason, blackmail, and terrorist methods will be inevitably punished.

Rajan Menon: He accused him of trying to foment a 1917-style revolution, i.e. the revolution that overthrew the Tsarist regime in Russia and thereafter the provisional government. So it looked like when Prigozhin abruptly, for reasons that are not clear to me, at least stopped this march to Moscow, that he was going to face either imprisonment or death in the event he was sent off to Belarus and has been there but periodically came to Moscow.

The surmise and again, I have to stick to the evidence. My surmise is Putin believed that taking down Prigozhin, imprisoning him, and having him killed was probably too much of a risk. And he worked out with Lukashenko, the president of Belarus this arrangement where where Prigozhin would be allowed to decamp to Belarus.

Sam Hawley: So the Wagner group, which was led by Prigozhin, played a big role in the Ukraine war, as you mentioned, but also in other conflicts in Africa, in Syria. So tell me, how significant is his death in terms of those conflicts? How will the Wagner troops even react to this news?

Rajan Menon: Well, it’s so let me answer the last question first if I might. So Wagner has already put out a statement, which is a statement of defiance that essentially says Prigozhin was a great military commander. And our leader and I’m paraphrasing here, Wagner will only grow stronger. And if there’s a Judas. Mark the word, who has stabbed Wagner in the back, then Wagner’s strength will only grow. What it does, we cannot say.

What we have to watch for is this: Some military officers are unhappy with the war for the same reasons that Prigozhin was. And there are reasons to be unhappy because, since November or so, the Russian army has not been able to take any land from Ukraine. The Ukrainians have taken back about 50% of the land they lost. And this was supposed to be, by all accounts, a war in which Russia would trounce Ukraine, a far weaker state.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, it’s been a long, hard war for Vladimir Putin and Rajan. What does this mean now for his leadership? Do you think?

Rajan Menon: It all depends on two things. How does the war go for Russia? Does the Russian army acquit itself better and turn the situation around so that something is approaching a victory that Putin can sell to the Russian public or do things get worse? Does Wagner then become part of a group within Russian society that becomes much more critical of the war?

Sam Hawley: Rajan Menon is the director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Anna John, and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. Over the weekend, Catch this Week with James Glenday. He’ll be looking at whether we’re prepared for a potential summer of bushfires. And watch your feed on Sunday for the latest episode of Matt Bevan’s “If You’re Listening” podcast. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.