Ever since he led a mutinous march on Moscow in late June Yevgeny Prigozhin was described by Russia watchers as “a dead man walking”.
Commenting recently on the mercenary boss’s life expectancy the CIA Director William Burns even said: “If I were Prigozhin I wouldn’t fire my food taster”.
If it is ever proven that the mid-air destruction of a plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin was an act of deliberate, cold-blooded revenge by the Kremlin, this will go down in Russian history as the ultimate “special military operation”.
Prigozhin, a former convict, chef and hot dog salesman-turned mercenary boss, had a lot of admirers amongst the ranks of his Wagner mercenary army and beyond. Many will have witnessed his warm reception by the public in Rostov-on-Don when he turned up there exactly two months ago in the throes of his aborted one-day rebellion.
But he also had a lot of enemies in Moscow, most notably in the upper ranks of the Russian military whose leaders he frequently and publicly criticised.
What has probably turned out to have been his fatal mistake was crossing President Putin when he launched that march on Moscow on 23 June. Although he did not mention Putin by name at the time, Prigozhin infuriated the Kremlin by very publicly criticising the official reasons given for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He told Russians they had been deceived and that their sons were dying in the Ukraine war due to poor leadership. This was heresy and Putin’s video message on that day was sizzling with vitriol. He called Prigozhin’s march on Moscow a betrayal and a stab in the back.
Vladimir Putin does not forgive traitors nor those who challenge him.
The former Russian intelligence officer-turned defector, Alexander Litvinenko, died a slow and agonising death in a London hospital in 2006 after he was poisoned with radioactive Polonium-210.
A subsequent investigation concluded that this assassins brought the lethal substance with them from Russia and that it could only have been sourced from a Russian government laboratory. Moscow denied any involvement but refused to surrender the two suspects for trial.
Then there was Sergei Skripal, a former Russian KGB officer and again a defector to Britain.
In 2018 he and his daughter Yulia narrowly escaped death when GRU Russian military intelligence officers allegedly put Novichok nerve agent on the door handle of his house in Salisbury.
A discarded perfume bottle containing the lethal agent was later found by a local Wiltshire resident, Dawn Sturgess, who died after applying it to her wrists.
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