While Putin’s spokesperson denied that he’d killed Prigozhin, a former Kremlin official told Insider that the rebellion made his death „inevitable.“
the Kremlin’s spokesperson said the idea that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the Wednesday plane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigozhin was „a complete lie.“
But a former senior official who served at the highest levels of the Russian government told Insider a different story.
„The rebellion was an anomaly,“ they wrote. „But the consequences were indeed inevitable.“
In other words: The crash was no accident. It was unavoidable payback for Prigozhin’s insubordination, which culminated in a march towards Moscow with a column of his Wagner Group mercenaries. The march was a stunningly open challenge to the authority of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man who had found Prigozhin when he was running a string of Saint Petersburg restaurants and made him into one of Russia’s most feared power brokers, trafficking in weaponry, gold, and armed men across three continents.
As for Prigozhin himself, the former Kremlin official scoffed at the idea that his death was an untimely surprise.
„His death could not have been more timely,“ they wrote. „His life was that of Chekov’s gun. When his blank was fired, there was nothing left to do but be swept behind the curtain and let the play carry on.“
By invoking Chekhov’s gun, the official was suggesting that any private military force that refused to submit to Putin’s direct control was destined to be crushed by him.
That famous storytelling principle — a gun innocently hanging on the wall in a play’s first act will be fired in its third — is one of Russian literature’s great contributions to world culture. But the story of Prigozhin’s rise and fall can also be told through a trove of internal files that exposed the inner workings of his corporate empire in the months before his death. Those files included dozens of detailed spreadsheets showing how Prigozhin’s Wagner Group tracked and spent its money:
Wages for a Nigerian gig worker to push Kremlin memes through a troll farm — $276.
Fuel to light up a famous hillside sign in the Central African Republic — $791.
