Wagner’s Ring Cycle plunges to earth in flames

The lives and death of Yevgeny Prigozhin passed through ‘The Godfather’, ‘The Prince’, and finally ‘Gotterdammerung’. The former street thug, jailbird, and hot dog seller rose to power and riches, forgot Machiavelli’s maxim about shooting to kill, and, in a scene a modern Richard Wagner might write, plunged to earth in flames. The opera continues. If Putin is the Wotan figure in Gotterdammerung he may meet a similar end, but not yet.

The Russian president took almost 24 hours to comment on the death of a man he had known for a quarter of a century and said “He had a difficult path and made serious mistakes in his life. But he got results – for himself, and when I asked him”. However, the Kremlin had already conveyed its message in clear terms with a series of what looks like choreographed events.  The Wagner Group’s ‘March on Moscow; was on 23 June. Prigozhin’s jet came down on 23 August. Even as it was falling from the sky Putin was on live television handing out ‘Hero of Russia’ medals. A previous recipient of the state’s highest honour was Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Kremlin also chose 23 August as the day to officially announce that Army General Sergei Surovokin, suspected of advance knowledge of the ‘March on Moscow’ had been relieved of his post.

Prigozhin claimed he was only threatening the corrupt Ministry of Defence in June but seemed not to realise that by so doing he was threatening the state and that Putin appears to believe l’etat, c’est moi.  Machiavelli wrote that “the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge”. The Wire put it into modern form with “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

The ‘Silovki’, those closest to the President who work for the Solovye Ministerstva (Ministries of Force), were cleaning house. Their message – challenging Putin’s rule is a death sentence. The story was given just 40 seconds on state TV on Thursday night. For Russian viewers even that will have been enough for them to understand what had happened.

Why now? The Putin/Prigozhin deal brokered by Belarus’s President Lukashenko allowed the Wagner forces to move to Belarus, and for Prigozhin to keep most of his money as long as he kept quiet. It was the type of deal Putin has done before. He may even have meant it but changed his mind after Prigozhin continued to harbour ambitions including making money in Africa. More likely was that the Kremlin waited until the ‘Silovki’ felt confident they had undermined Wager to the extent that Putin could kill Prigozhin without suffering significant retaliation.

Over the past 8 weeks Wagner has been systematically weakened. Other existing private military companies (PMC) have been strengthened and new ones formed. Wagner personnel have been enticed into their ranks including some officers. If you are a thug freed from prison to fight in a PMC then loyalty to Wagner might only be pay check deep. The GRU (military intelligence) has been busy blocking Wagner in the Sahel even as the Foreign Ministry has been reassuring the region’s dictators that Russia will back them.  State media had also been busy destroying Prigozhin’s reputation.

To many in Russia Prigozhin’s reputation was already shot. During the ‘March on Moscow’ his forces brought down two military helicopters and killed 13 personnel without anyone being brought to justice.

Judicial accountability for the murder of the 10 people in the plane is unlikely. If it was shot down then Russia’s Investigative Committee can blame malfunction or human error by jittery personnel mistaking the plane for a Ukrainian drone. If they decide it was a bomb then it can be a ‘terrorist act’ which can be blamed on a dissident group, the CIA, or Ukraine. To cover all the bases the Committee has opened a criminal case to look at charges of violating the rules of air safety and the Federal Agency for Air Transport, has created a special commission to investigate the plane’s safety certificates and the weather at the time of the crash.

So, to the fallout. There may be some pushback from Wagner, but its senior leadership has been taken out and the second-tier leaders have seen their fate if they decide to act. Prigozhin’s second-in-command Dimitry Utkin, and armaments procurement chief Valery Chekalov were also on the passenger list of his doomed plane. Utkin, a Neo-Nazi who had SS insignia tattoos on each side of his neck, named the mercenary group after Hitler’s favourite composer. Wagner social media-connected platforms are full of threats to “March on the Kremlin” and “Kill all traitors from the Ministry of Defence!” It’s doubtful they would get very far this time. Prigozhin may have some ‘Kompromat’(compromising material) on the Putin regime but either way Wagner’s days look numbered. Even if it survives in name, it will come under greater state control.

The Russian military high command, notably Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff General Valery Gerasimov, have seen that their commander in chief has backed them against a man and a force that openly humiliated them.

President Lukashenko has been undermined. He had given ‘security guarantees’ to Prigozhin, Putin has very publicly shown a Lukashenko guarantee to be what it is. Useless.

Beijing has been reassured that Putin is in charge and will remain so after next year’s election. Challenging him has consequences as opposition leader Alexy Navalny found out. After failing to murder him with nerve agent the Kremlin instead engineered a ten-year jail term for him and had it increased by 19 years earlier this month.

And Putin? He still has many enemies, and a population unsure of his leadership, but there isn’t the third element which can sometimes trigger a coup – a lack of fear. The Kremlin will probably now regard Wagner’s challenge to its leadership as a settled affair with only one or two loose ends to tie up.

In the long term though he may still meet his own Gotterdammerung. In Wagner’s masterpiece ‘The Ring Cycle’ those Wotan hoped would inherit the world meet an unfortunate end. As with most things in a Wagner opera it takes a long time, but eventually the inferno caused by Siegfried’s funeral pyre reaches higher and higher until Valhalla and the gods are engulfed in the flames.

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