The chances that this is an accident are pretty low. Putin wanted to get as little blowback as possible from knocking him off, since he's widely popular. I'm sure he didn't think twice about murdering 9 other innocent people at the same time.
Presumably 8, because judging by the statements, Dmitry Utkin - his right-hand man - was on board. He is a hardened criminal, a murderer and a lover of Nazi symbols on his body.
As with other suspected recent Russian / Putin assassinations, the very audacity is a key component. "We'll blow your plane out of the sky and send nine others to their graves" is a strong message, much as polonium tea, street gunnings, and killing journalists in their homes have been.
Everybody in that list were high ranks in the Wagner group. All supporting if not directly commiting many atrocities and war crimes in Sudan, Syria or Ukranie. We talk of a group executing people with hammers or cutting their hands and beheading them while recording all, and sending the video to all the contacts in the phone of the victim.
Calling them "innocent people" is extremely generous.
The most interesting part is how carefully the killer assured to behead the top of the group at the same time in one single hit.
Hypothesis: he just faked his own death, to allow him to operate in Africa for a few years unnoticed. Of course, if his dental records are matched to a corpse later today, this will be a short-lived hypothesis.
That depends who is doing/reporting the matching. This could very well be an Epstein-like situation where we'll simply never know the verifiable truth.
autopsy showed he was full of polonium and shot himself twice in the back of the head before jumping out of a plane that accidentally collided with a missile
Plenty of speculation that Putin bumped him off, but it could very well be the other extreme: Prigozhin knew Putin wasn't going to let him live, regardless of any "deal", and so he faked his death?
Both are just ass-pulls without further information.
The assumptions for my wild ass theory are that he thought the coup was going to succeed. Remember, he drove something like a thousand kilometers towards Moscow, AFTER it was clear what he was doing. There are videos of Rosgvardia soldiers just standing by and letting his column through. He was attacked by helicopters, and shot at least one down, so it was going pretty well. IMO he honestly should have just gone through with it, but that's only because I hold no value in his life or Putin's.
After it failed, I assume he knows Putin was going to at least try and kill him. That's why I think he would try to fake his own death.
But eh, that's just as likely to me as some other crazy 3D chess.
but thats the thing - the coup didnt fail. Dude was ~one hour from entering Moscow and taking it over with minimal opposition lacking heavy weapons. He chose to stop, he alone decided against toppling russian government and becoming the new tzar.
Smart people don't always get everything right. With the information he had at the time, and the situational awareness he had at the time, he might have had reason to believe the coup could have succeeded -- or at least was the best out of bad options.
There's no reason why someone might have failed at a coup but also succeeded at faking his own death to avoid repercussions.
Not saying that's what's happened here, but I think your reasoning against it is flawed. People are complex, and do smart things in some situations, and dumb things in others. And sometimes the dumb things aren't obviously dumb until after the fact.
There's no way everyone in the free world saw this coming and Prigozhin did not. I'm still scratching my head about what he thought his endgame was going to be after the coup.
Easy: he thought the coup would be the action with the highest chance of success at the point when he had committed himself to going ahead with it.
He was going to lose control of Wagner if the coup didn't succeed, whether or not he tried. So no surprise he made that attempt. You don't get to where he did in life without being bold, taking risks, and being lucky. And it's likely that at the point where he had already committed himself to the coup, it looked more likely to succeed than it does now with the benefit of hindsight.
As for why he kept hanging around Russia... where else is he going to go? He was a wanted man everywhere. Wanted by both the civilized world, and Russia. There are no good options in that circumstance.
Still, if your options are ending up in The Hague or getting fired by your murderous boss, internationally embarrassing your boss in order to get a better severance package seems to be so much, much worse than either option.
But again, we are talking about a literal mafia boss. He probably was dumb enough to think he had actual leverage.
What makes you think a mafia boss would be stupid? Wouldn't street smart be exactly the kind of trait that would put you in the upper echelons of a mafia state such as Russia.
I think there is a lot more to this story than what has come to light.
I suspect they were threatening to kill his family and had the means to do so.
> What makes you think a mafia boss would be stupid? Wouldn't street smart be exactly the kind of trait that would put you in the upper echelons of a mafia state such as Russia.
What makes you think a mafia boss would be smart? Their defining features are ruthlessness and brutality, not intelligence or "street smarts". Putin for example is known for bombing civilian apartment buildings to get into power and very publicly poisoning traitors with polonium and nerve agents, not to mention entering a disastrous war and tanking the Russian economy.
Those upper echelons are only there as an accident of history. They were in the right place and the right time to loot the Russian state during privatization while killing, imprisoning, and controlling all their opposition.
> Those upper echelons are only there as an accident of history.
That seems like an awfully bold assertion. Mafia bosses have a different set of rules than most of us, but to think they survive by repeatedly flipping a coin and being lucky is preposterous.
That’s literally how all the Russian oligarchs got their power. By being in the right place at the right time to buy up all the privatized industries for a tiny fraction of what they were literally worth.
If you pick 100 people off the street, line them up for a race for a million dollars, and fire a starting pistol... the one who crosses the finish line first doesn't do so by luck.
I think you're judging him by values of "normal" people and weigh the average outcomes of choices. But criminals are known as people willing to take risks and would bet on low-probable but very lucrative outcome.
A route in Hague was a guaranteed lifetime sentence, while playing some role in the elites gave some low-probable possibilities.
> Easy: he thought the coup would be the action with the highest chance of success at the point when he had committed himself to going ahead with it.
From some of the post-coup reporting (Washington Post?), there were comments from the US intel community that the coup had much wider support past Wagner, but was set to launch several days later.
Russian intelligence caught wind of it... and decision was made to launch it prematurely.
Granted, the US intel community is far from an unbiased party, but it would explain Prigozhin's calculus is a more believable way.
And oligarchs being upset at Putin for upsetting the business-as-usual applecart for no good reason isn't unreasonable.
It almost certainly wasn't a coup, nor was it intended to be. It was a boyar making a pilgrimage to Moscow to petition the king for help. Specifically, with Shoigu and Gerasimov's takeover of Wagner.
> When it comes down to it, Prigozhin was not trying to supplant Putin so much as petition him. This formulation was suggested by Anatoly Pinsky in a very interesting article in the War on the Rocks (https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/prigozhin-as-petitioner-ma...). It was disruptive, it may even have seemed dangerous, but the perverse irony is that it came from a place of a kind of loyalty. Prigozhin was not in any way, questioning Putin‘s right to rule; he was simply trying to influence his policies. In the quasi-mediaeval political environment of Putin‘s court, this is not necessarily personal disloyalty. Putin was clearly viscerally angry when he recorded his first message on the Saturday morning. He may also have been scared. But as he came to realise what was going on, he seems to have become less personally affronted. In other words, he not only came to understand what Prigozhin was doing, he excepted in a way, the fundamental systemic legitimacy of what he was doing.
>
> We do not have to start speculating about compromising material, or that Putin still fears Prigozhin, and his maybe 15,000 - although the figure is likely to be is rather smaller - Wagner fighters. Rather that Putin acknowledges Prigozhin was engaging in the sharp-elbowed politics that he himself has encouraged. After all, we have seen Igor Sechin set up a minister and get him imprisoned, Kadyrov repeatedly blackmail the federal centre for money, and security agencies frame, detain and possibly even defenestrate officers of their rivals. Horizontal conflict is at the heart of Putin's system.
>
> Of course, Prigozhin overreached. He needed to be punished, he needed to lose the opportunity to repeat this exercise, and he needed demonstratively to be banished from the blessed confines of Putin's circle (not that he was ever that close to the personage in reality). However, so long as he’s useful and so long as Putin accepts that he is true to the fundamentals of today’s neo-mediaeval Russian politics, then there may be a place for Prigozhin after all.
Okay, but as high-minded as this prose is, it ignores a pretty crucial thing - the only reason Wagner existed in the first place was to give some amount of plausible deniability between Russia and their foreign policy interventions. So countries like Germany could have a legal precedent to trade with Russia so long as all of the war crimes were technically off of the books.
So not only was this a huge miscalculation nationally that deeply embarrassed Putin, Wagner was supposed to look independent. So beseeching Putin for help only made it worse.
The irony is that Prigozhin probably thought he had leverage, but the only real thing of value to Moscow about Wagner's sad little army was the independence.
Sure, Wagner being "independent" in Africa was helpful.
The cause of this dispute, however, was the Russian MoD (Shoigu and Gerasimov) had decided that all Wagner employees operating in Ukraine and Russia were going to become part of the regular Russian military. Before Prigozhin's ersatz mutiny. see eg
Thus there was no remaining pretense of independence, at least wrt Wagner forces operating in Ukraine.
I also don't think it embarrassed Putin, or at least not in the manner that (I suspect) you think. Putin's role is to intermediate disputes between the various competing boyars beneath him. He had let the Shoigu + Gerasimov vs Progozhin dispute fester instead of picking a winner. Hence Progozhin's march. The embarrassment stems from not fulfilling the role that only Putin can play in their political system (ie the final determination of disputes from the various independent actors operating underneath him, including both formal state agencies and oligarchs/informal agencies.)
Also, Prigozhin's post-march endgame was obvious: he continues to operate Wagner in Ukraine, and -- if possible -- removes Shoigu + Gerasimov. With an eye to developing his own independent power base in Russia, which Prigozhin didn't previously have.
>It was a boyar making a pilgrimage to Moscow to petition the king for help.
There's no way Prigozhin thought Putin didn't understand what was going on. The narrative of "If the honorable <leader> knew how bad things were down here, he would surely fix it" as if the leader hasn't seen the videos we all have seen is stupid, a lie, and was the same lie fed to peons in the Wehrmacht at the end of the second world war when they were starving in their trenches during the desperation of the liberation of Europe.
He also had much more information and experience than any of us. Perhaps his decision wasn't that ridiculous from his point of view even though it turned out the way it did.
Leaving Bahmut = disobeying orders, judged by desertion. He had executed desertors before and had a very public speech than desertors deserve to die and will be executed. result: jail (and death) or death.
Coup = Free card out of the Bahmut tomb, and maybe live for one couple months more as long as he don't try to return to Moscow.
A todo Prigozhin le llega su San Martin I suppose. Africa can breathe with relief today.
Oh yeah good catch, I use AdGuard and thought I had it set to an internal DNS resolver for it's upstream but nope, it was CloudFlare and fixing it fixed the Archive issue. Thanks.
Precision: Priogozhin is not yet confirmed dead, he and Utkin(the commander of Wagner, a.k.a code name Wagner) were among the passengers on the list but no bodies identified yet.
There is a second Wagner plane(RA02748) currently circling around Moscow.
There are also unconfirmed videos already appearing of the fall, looks like anti-aircraft missiles.
252 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadEverybody in that list were high ranks in the Wagner group. All supporting if not directly commiting many atrocities and war crimes in Sudan, Syria or Ukranie. We talk of a group executing people with hammers or cutting their hands and beheading them while recording all, and sending the video to all the contacts in the phone of the victim.
Calling them "innocent people" is extremely generous.
The most interesting part is how carefully the killer assured to behead the top of the group at the same time in one single hit.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qMFFlF0xdI8
Secret service was photographed in the ground. I am sure they happen to have dental records with them.
Unconfirmed, but seems very plausible.
Update: the latest news is that the plane had an accidental collision with an missile.
Both are just ass-pulls without further information.
After it failed, I assume he knows Putin was going to at least try and kill him. That's why I think he would try to fake his own death.
But eh, that's just as likely to me as some other crazy 3D chess.
Mussolini was in Milan, and stayed in Milan, when he ordered the coup march to Rome.
Mussolini lead his coup from >100-600km away from the march, why would the leader of Wagner need to be in the convoy?
but thats the thing - the coup didnt fail. Dude was ~one hour from entering Moscow and taking it over with minimal opposition lacking heavy weapons. He chose to stop, he alone decided against toppling russian government and becoming the new tzar.
There's no reason why someone might have failed at a coup but also succeeded at faking his own death to avoid repercussions.
Not saying that's what's happened here, but I think your reasoning against it is flawed. People are complex, and do smart things in some situations, and dumb things in others. And sometimes the dumb things aren't obviously dumb until after the fact.
He was going to lose control of Wagner if the coup didn't succeed, whether or not he tried. So no surprise he made that attempt. You don't get to where he did in life without being bold, taking risks, and being lucky. And it's likely that at the point where he had already committed himself to the coup, it looked more likely to succeed than it does now with the benefit of hindsight.
As for why he kept hanging around Russia... where else is he going to go? He was a wanted man everywhere. Wanted by both the civilized world, and Russia. There are no good options in that circumstance.
But again, we are talking about a literal mafia boss. He probably was dumb enough to think he had actual leverage.
I think there is a lot more to this story than what has come to light. I suspect they were threatening to kill his family and had the means to do so.
What makes you think a mafia boss would be smart? Their defining features are ruthlessness and brutality, not intelligence or "street smarts". Putin for example is known for bombing civilian apartment buildings to get into power and very publicly poisoning traitors with polonium and nerve agents, not to mention entering a disastrous war and tanking the Russian economy.
Those upper echelons are only there as an accident of history. They were in the right place and the right time to loot the Russian state during privatization while killing, imprisoning, and controlling all their opposition.
That seems like an awfully bold assertion. Mafia bosses have a different set of rules than most of us, but to think they survive by repeatedly flipping a coin and being lucky is preposterous.
Those that flipped tails are dead or in prison.
A route in Hague was a guaranteed lifetime sentence, while playing some role in the elites gave some low-probable possibilities.
From some of the post-coup reporting (Washington Post?), there were comments from the US intel community that the coup had much wider support past Wagner, but was set to launch several days later.
Russian intelligence caught wind of it... and decision was made to launch it prematurely.
Granted, the US intel community is far from an unbiased party, but it would explain Prigozhin's calculus is a more believable way.
And oligarchs being upset at Putin for upsetting the business-as-usual applecart for no good reason isn't unreasonable.
See Mark Galeotti's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Galeotti ) writings. I can't find where he discusses this in his podcast, but https://www.patreon.com/posts/prigozhins-plot-86895135
> When it comes down to it, Prigozhin was not trying to supplant Putin so much as petition him. This formulation was suggested by Anatoly Pinsky in a very interesting article in the War on the Rocks (https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/prigozhin-as-petitioner-ma...). It was disruptive, it may even have seemed dangerous, but the perverse irony is that it came from a place of a kind of loyalty. Prigozhin was not in any way, questioning Putin‘s right to rule; he was simply trying to influence his policies. In the quasi-mediaeval political environment of Putin‘s court, this is not necessarily personal disloyalty. Putin was clearly viscerally angry when he recorded his first message on the Saturday morning. He may also have been scared. But as he came to realise what was going on, he seems to have become less personally affronted. In other words, he not only came to understand what Prigozhin was doing, he excepted in a way, the fundamental systemic legitimacy of what he was doing.
>
> We do not have to start speculating about compromising material, or that Putin still fears Prigozhin, and his maybe 15,000 - although the figure is likely to be is rather smaller - Wagner fighters. Rather that Putin acknowledges Prigozhin was engaging in the sharp-elbowed politics that he himself has encouraged. After all, we have seen Igor Sechin set up a minister and get him imprisoned, Kadyrov repeatedly blackmail the federal centre for money, and security agencies frame, detain and possibly even defenestrate officers of their rivals. Horizontal conflict is at the heart of Putin's system.
>
> Of course, Prigozhin overreached. He needed to be punished, he needed to lose the opportunity to repeat this exercise, and he needed demonstratively to be banished from the blessed confines of Putin's circle (not that he was ever that close to the personage in reality). However, so long as he’s useful and so long as Putin accepts that he is true to the fundamentals of today’s neo-mediaeval Russian politics, then there may be a place for Prigozhin after all.
So not only was this a huge miscalculation nationally that deeply embarrassed Putin, Wagner was supposed to look independent. So beseeching Putin for help only made it worse.
The irony is that Prigozhin probably thought he had leverage, but the only real thing of value to Moscow about Wagner's sad little army was the independence.
The cause of this dispute, however, was the Russian MoD (Shoigu and Gerasimov) had decided that all Wagner employees operating in Ukraine and Russia were going to become part of the regular Russian military. Before Prigozhin's ersatz mutiny. see eg
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-military-trying-to-ta...
Thus there was no remaining pretense of independence, at least wrt Wagner forces operating in Ukraine.
I also don't think it embarrassed Putin, or at least not in the manner that (I suspect) you think. Putin's role is to intermediate disputes between the various competing boyars beneath him. He had let the Shoigu + Gerasimov vs Progozhin dispute fester instead of picking a winner. Hence Progozhin's march. The embarrassment stems from not fulfilling the role that only Putin can play in their political system (ie the final determination of disputes from the various independent actors operating underneath him, including both formal state agencies and oligarchs/informal agencies.)
Also, Prigozhin's post-march endgame was obvious: he continues to operate Wagner in Ukraine, and -- if possible -- removes Shoigu + Gerasimov. With an eye to developing his own independent power base in Russia, which Prigozhin didn't previously have.
Ukraine might blow it up though.
There's no way Prigozhin thought Putin didn't understand what was going on. The narrative of "If the honorable <leader> knew how bad things were down here, he would surely fix it" as if the leader hasn't seen the videos we all have seen is stupid, a lie, and was the same lie fed to peons in the Wehrmacht at the end of the second world war when they were starving in their trenches during the desperation of the liberation of Europe.
The honorable leader blah blah petition has occurred throughout Russian history, particularly under the Tsar and even persisting into the Soviet era.
Nevertheless, Putin was clearly not swayed.
It isn't a contradiction for smart people to fuck up and do dumb things. Sometimes people just miscalculate and make mistakes.
Through the use of power and connections, some people manage to fix their mistakes and synchophants start claiming it was "4D chess" all along.
Really they just screw up like everyone else, but their resources often allow them to recover.
When they screw up big enough, you're left with "how did they not see it coming" "paradoxical" situations like this.
Remaining in Bahmut = sure death
Leaving Bahmut = disobeying orders, judged by desertion. He had executed desertors before and had a very public speech than desertors deserve to die and will be executed. result: jail (and death) or death.
Coup = Free card out of the Bahmut tomb, and maybe live for one couple months more as long as he don't try to return to Moscow.
A todo Prigozhin le llega su San Martin I suppose. Africa can breathe with relief today.
Do take a chance to enjoy his mastery of the art of disguise however
https://nypost.com/2023/07/06/photos-show-wagner-boss-yevgen...
It's possibly Cloudflare-related:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681>
Small mercies in what appears to be a merciless regime.
There is a second Wagner plane(RA02748) currently circling around Moscow.
There are also unconfirmed videos already appearing of the fall, looks like anti-aircraft missiles.