Yevgeny Prigozhin has been a dead man walking for two months since his so-called “march on Moscow” mutiny faltered – his death was inevitable after going too far for Vladimir Putin
The aftershock of the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin may be felt for years across Russia and signals a pivotal moment in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s struggle to hold onto power.
Prigozhin has been a dead man walking for two months since his so-called “march on Moscow” mutiny faltered, became a high-risk step too far for the Kremlin leader and his death was inevitable. But the fact that even in so-called exile in Belarus, he was still seeking publicity and openly trying to gather his Wagner men together may have brought on his death sooner.
Although he had served nine years behind bars for a series of grubby crimes he became a kind of monster-rock star for Wagner troops, many of them murderers recruited from prisons. Ultra-nationalists are now flocking to a St Petersburg shrine for Prigozhin, some of them relatives of Wagner dead who fought in Ukraine and some comparing him to Stalin.
For Putin, there is a worrying possibility he may have created a martyr whose history may be re-written as some kind of hero on Russian city street corners. Many Russian families are affected by the war in Ukraine having lost relatives and to justify their deaths they may have built Prigozhin into something he was not – someone to be admired.