Autocracies have their own ways to deal with dissent. They do away with those who gain might and challenge the establishment. Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was among 10 persons on board who died in the crash of a private plane flying between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The incident occurs just two months after the chief of the dreaded private military posed the biggest internal challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, but withdrew following a secret deal with Putin. While nothing links the mishap to Putin, those who are familiar with his ways of governance are clear in their mind that this was another mischief. Putin’s growth from a KGB spy to Russian ruler for an uninterrupted 24 years has been an era of brutal suppression of rights. The Belsan school siege by terrorists in 2004 showed how far the red despot could go in attaining his goals. The siege ended with the death of 333 people – nearly half of them schoolchildren. Putin showed to the world that, worse comes to worse, this was the way to deal with terrorism. Fact is also that, with this brutal act, the separatist offensives in Chechnya ended in a whimper.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s or his Wagner army’s notoriety is also equally well-known. Where the Russian military hesitated to tread, it stepped in and accomplished a task at the ground level. It also meant rapes, loot and much more that was associated with wanton ways of unconventional warfare. Wagner’s army did not have to obey international rules that guided war between nations, other conflicts, or of ground offensives. It was a law unto itself, its ranks swelled by hardened criminals released from Russian prisons or the old civil war fighters from Syria and the like. It perpetrated a kind of “neo-Nazism” and “far-right extremism”. The Wagner army had been given infrastructural support from the Russian military, as was also evident in the current war in Ukraine. Its forces interjected notoriously in civil wars in the geopolitical region — often — to promote Russian interests.
The end of Prigozhin does not necessarily mean the end of his private military. Putin must have an alternative plan ready to keep its show going. Notably, the Russian President had not faltered for most part in the past – except for his epic blunder in marching the Russian military into Ukraine. With able backing from the West, Ukraine is fighting fit and the war field has seen 62,000 deaths while 1.7crore people have been displaced. Without a major loss of face, it would be difficult for Putin to extricate himself out of Ukraine. With ill health and mental stress, many suspect the President’s days too are numbered.
