The Assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin: An Analysis

[00:00:00]on June the 23rd 2023 a Russian oligarch named yevi progan decided to make a video as the public face of the Russian mercenary company known as the Vagner group prian spoke representing thousands of private soldiers backed up by tanks artillery warplanes and a reputation more Savage and bloodthirsty than nearly any other military unit on the planet and when Yi progan spoke on that fateful summer day he spoke of rebellion against Russia's Ministry of Defense whose leaders had spurned prian and his Vagner group for what progan had deemed to be the last time in the following hours pran's forces would take over a strategic Russian city then storm their way northward crashing through roadblocks and shooting down helicopters on their way to the Russian capital of Moscow it was an incredibly bold feet one that put progan in the crosshairs of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin himself and though both Putin and prosan would survive that day the entire Affair brought up a critical question how had progan escaped Putin's vengeful wrath if indeed he had escaped at all now exactly 2 months to the day after progan led the Vagner group's attempted coup we have our answer on August the 23rd 2023 Havey progan six of his associates and three flight crew members plummeted to their deaths near the Russian village of Keno in the heart of Russia roughly halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg the death of Yi progan and the circumstances behind the airplane crash that ended his life are murky first and more information will certainly be released in the coming weeks on what will happen to progan feared Varner group but today in this special and rather rushed episode of oror Graphics we're going to be digging into the death of progan himself how it happens what it means and what comes [Music] next before we even begin to discuss an analysis of oan demise we first got to nail down precisely what happens at least to the extent that it's possible to do so when trying to peer through the veil into Vladimir Putin's Russia and we've got to include a disclaimer here that for now like everybody else in the world we can only report news based on the information coming out of Russia itself a place where we hope is no surprise to you state media is carefully and constantly tailored to present a version of events that is agreeable to Putin's regime naturally we don't know what we don't know and it's entirely likely that many of the big questions about this incident will actually just remain unanswered forever what we do know is that on August the 23rd 2023 roughly 65 p.m local time an imraa Legacy 600 aircraft fell out of the sky into ver a blast the region of Russia located immediately to the northwest of Moscow the twin engine Business Jet produced by the Brazilian Aerospace Corporation in Brea the Legacy 600 is a reliable jet with a nigh on impeachable service record and zero history of the sort of incidents that would would lead to this sort of Crash but this particular Legacy 600 was already well known before the crash identified by the call sign Romeo Alpha 0279 5 the jet is known to be yeni pran's personal transport so when news broke via Russia State media that an imer aircraft had crashed the most important question immediately became whether progan had been on board prior to the crash the plane had been observed on global flight tracking website as having left Moscow about half an hour earlier before climbing to a height of about 8,500 M or 8,000 ft but once the plane reached altitude its data transmission suddenly ceased possibly because its transponder had been disabled or possibly because the plane no longer existed critically the transponder had sent no data to indicate that the plane had begun losing altitude a fact that put the next piece of information into stark contrast as depicted in a video posted by Echo FM to the social media appap forly known as Twitter a plane believed to be progan IMO was spotted falling from the sky in what's called a flat SP where the plane's fuselage basically stays level with the Horizon but the plane spins uncontrollably in a pattern that is exceptionally difficult to recover from after the plane is seen falling out of the air nearby to an oddly shaped cloud that may signify an explosion it disappears behind a greenhouse a few moments later the same video depicts a plume of black smoke rising from the ground in what is almost certainly the spot where y have Genny progan met his end before long Russian State media began to confirm that there had been bodies discovered at the crash site then that there had been 10 people on the flight and then after that that yeni progan himself had been listed on the passenger manifest then the VG group's telegram channels began to claim that progan had been confirmed dead then on the ground images and video began to circulate of the site where the plane crashed including ones that depicted a wide patch of ground engulfed in flames more news about the plane's condition emerged including that its vertical stabilizer its tail finin seemed to be missing as it plummeted to Earth finally the Russian f ederal Air transport agency confirmed the news that the entire world had known was coming Yi progan had been on board that flight and was confirmed dead now as we mentioned in the intro Yi progan has been widely understood to be a target for assassination for the past two months in the aftermath of his Vagner group's failed coup attempt against Moscow now hero War Graphics we actually did a similar special episode covering Varner's march on the Russian Capital when it happened so do check that out if you'd like a deep dive on it but here we're just going to quickly recap the basics prior to June of 2023 progan and his Varner group had been longtime supporters of Vladimir Putin's regime a private mercenary company made up mostly of volunteers at least prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine the Vagner group got their start helping Russia Annex Crimea and then waging a low-grade Insurgency in Ukraine's donbass region from the mid-2010s all the way up into Russia's fullscale invasion they also played a major role in Russia's intervention in in Syria during the Civil War there other vgy units are dispatched around the world particularly in Asia Africa and the South American country of Venezuela where their job is to protect Russian interests from gold and diamond mines to allied military training programs to Russia backed heads of state basically the Vagner group are the guys you want to send to Do Your Dirty Work they're disciplined they're regimented they're well trained but they aren't technically Russian troops meaning that it's difficult for World governments to hold Russia directly responsible for their actions they're also willing to cross a lot of lines in order to execute their mission from crimes against humanity and several Nations do Butchery of civilians to the killing of journalists so to put it simply the Varner group have never not been the bad guys seriously we're talking cartoon TV villain levels of nefariousness from these people constantly with real pain and suffering being brought to everybody in their path but they've also been bad guys on Vladimir Putin's payroll something that only became more clear with their involvements in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine Vagner forces have achieved somewhat limited Battlefield success but they are constantly involved on the bloodiest fronts of the Ukraine war often using waves of poorly trained poorly armed Fighters recruited straight out of Russia's prisons they've proven to be excellent at forcing grinding Wars of attrition the sort of battles where they might lose one or five or 10 of their prisoner conscripts for every Ukrainian Defender who's killed but in reality they'll sacrifice 10 troops they see as EXP spendable in order to claim the life of one experienced battle hardened Warrior on the Ukrainian side but over the past year or so the Farner group and particularly Yi progan have been at odds with Russia's Ministry of Defense over a wide range of issues to sure some days prian and Russian defense minister Sergey Shu plus his right-and stoe General Valerie jimo would go to war over Battle Tactics other days it would be over incidents where Vagner or Russian forces ended up shelling each other's positions by mistake and other days it would be about ammunition or troop shortages in critical areas generally this sort of disagreement isn't really a problem for Vladimir Putin himself the shrewd manipulator and a veteran of the Soviet KGB spy agency Putin has a long habit of maintaining control over his underlings by pitting them against each other and allowing them to fight among themselves rather than build strength to oppose him but after months of mutual escalation between the Vagner group and the Russian Ministry of defense or mod things came to a head when defense minister Shu was able to convince Putin to endorse a plan to integrate the Vagner group into the Russian military directly far from an honor for prosan this would have placed the warlord and his mercenary Army as direct subordinates to shyo and Putin and Putin's willingness to endorse this plan appears to have signaled to Broan that shyu had essentially won their rivalry it's about this time the prosan is believed to have started laying the groundwork for what came two weeks later a bold play to force Shu out of his position beside Putin on the 23rd of June 2023 progan released a video rejecting Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine and exposing the true nature of Russia's destructive unjustified war of expansion in direct contradiction to the propaganda Russian State media had forced down their citizens throats for over a year in subsequent audio recordings prosan declared a March for justice against the Russian mod and within a few hours a column of Vagner Fighters had captured the Russian city of Ros ofon Don far from just being any old Russian city rostov on Don was essentially a forward operating base for Russia's entire invasion of Ukraine and just as important to Broan it was where defense minister shyu was believed to be located in what appears to have been a failed attempt to capture Shu Vagner took the city and in a striking show of apathy towards Vladimir Putin neither the military forces within the city nor a separate nearby column of Chetan Fighters loyal to Putin chose to engage Vagner forces once it became clear that senior mod officials had escaped their grasp a column of some 5 to 8,000 mercenaries began an advance northward toward Moscow on their way the Convoy EST a presence in towns along their route smashed through roadblocks and brought down multiple attack helicopters and a command and control plane even launching missiles into the town of ores Moscow was forced to barricade itself Vladimir Putin no longer sure that he wasn't pran's Target is believed to have fled the city according to flight tracking data although progan was eventually convinced to back off from Moscow his troops are believed to have come as close as 95 km from the city very narrowly averting what many said could have been the start of a civil war we're going through all of this history today to illustrate the depth and magnitude to which Yi progan royally up to put it simply a person does not do that to Vladimir Putin's Russia and expect to walk away no matter their justification and no matter what power they think that they have in pran's case Western intelligence believes that his family may have been taken as leverage to coers him to halt his advance and while the VNA column faced only limited resistance on their way to Moscow it appears that Russian forces did indeed dig in around the city in order to defend it but in the immediate aftermath of the C prian appeared to well not pay the price for his transgressions and in fact not pair in the slightest although his allies in the Russian mod most prominently the general Sergey sikin appeared to be punished for their ties to him Broan escaped serious reprisal quite possibly having face-to-face meetings with Putin himself in the days following his failed coup attempt he and his Vagner group Fighters were sent to bellarus or given the choice to integrate into the Russian military but not punished outright and even despite his supposed Exile prian movements have been tracked around Moscow and St Petersburg in the intervening months with the kind of obvious regularity that suggests that the Russian government couldn't have possibly missed him the coup attempt prompted no outpouring of support for Putin no condemnation of the Vagner group and more questions than answers in regard to the Readiness of the Russian military proper but ever since the coup took place majority of international onlookers have assumed that pran's time would come even if Putin and the mod had to suffer something of a loss of face in the interim so when news broke that pran's personal plane had crashed it was much less oh what and more of well what took so long although we cannot assign responsibility for the destruction of his plane at this stage and don't worry we'll be digging into that thorny issue in just a moment it's certainly not out of the ordinary for Putin's opponents to experience somewhat sketchy ends to their lives oligarch paval anov found himself on the wrong side of a hotel window in India in December of 2022 shortly after it published and then deleted criticism of Putin's war in Ukraine another oligarch and War critic Rebel magov also found himself on the wrong side of a window although in his case that window was attached to a hospital in Moscow press Minister M lesen ended up dead in Washington DC in a hotel room in 2015 while Boris nemov was shot in the back four times outside the Kremlin itself Alexander litano a former KGB agent died of radiation poisoning 3 weeks after he drank a cup of tea laced with polonium 210 and these are just a few in a long list of individuals who've met similar Fates for far lesser transgressions than those of ygi progan also on pran's doomed flight was a man named Dimitri utkin a figure long known to be the Vagner group's Battlefield Commander boasting a body adorned with Nazi tattoos and a reputation for Butchery in combat and a willingness to commit any number of war crimes in service to the Vagner group it's akkin who is often regarded as Varner's true leader his call sign Vaga is how the mercenary organization got its name a tribute to one of Adolf Hitler's favorite classical boes following on with his status as Wagner's top man on the grounds it may well have been akkin who personally led the Vagner group's Advance on Moscow even if he didn't it's exceptionally unlikely that an operation on the scale of Varner's coup attempts would have gone down without his explicit approval making him just as much of a Target as prion was out of that the fact that Arkin had the technical and War fighting knowledge to do real damage to Russian and Ukrainian forces alike and it's hardly a surprise that an assassination attempt against progin would have been time to take out akkin too the other people on the plane including two Vagner officers the head of Vagner security and foreign Logistics and two of pran's personal bodyguards would have been similarly unobjectionable targets for a Putin regime bent on Revenge now obviously we don't want to be victim blaming here but we would sincerely hope that it was neither a surprise to progan nor to Atkin that they might have ended up on a certain dictator's Hit List although Atkin might have been allowed to travel to barus although progan may have been allowed to visit some Petersburg and release public statements it's not really been a question of whether either man would have a bit of pain and even an untimely demise in his future the only question is how long that might have taken to go [Music] down before we go on we've got to acknowledge that there is a nonzero chance however small that the crash of pran's plane was accidental plane crashes happen however in frequently and although we hear at War Graphics find it extremely unlikely that this was a simple coincidence neither we nor anybody else can rule it out completely we've also got to point out that even if the crash was accidental well it doesn't really matter to put it simply this is geopolitics and the truth in geopolitics is very rarely the most important factor at play what matters is what the world believes that the truth is and what the world does in response to what it presumes to be true and in a world where a Russian warlord who led a march on Moscow against a murderous dictator with a long history of organizing the deaths of his Rivals plummets out of the sky into a fiery plane crash well it's as good as guaranteed that this incident will be treated as a Brazen Act of Revenge by the Putin regime assuming that the crash was an assassination the next question is how did it happen on the social media appap telegram users of a Vagner Associated Channel called grey Zone claims that the plane had been shot down by Russian air defenses as evidenced by the testimony of nearby residents who claim that there are two explosions prior to the crash and witness two Vapor Trails conspicuously the video we mentioned earlier depicting the falling plane showed nothing in the way of vapor trails that would have come from missile as with everything about this incident that doesn't mean that we can be completely sure that Russian surfac to a missiles weren't used but it certainly doesn't seem likely given the available evidence that being said it seems safe to say that something happened in the air before the crew lost control of their plane according to flight tracking site Flight Radar 24 new data analyzed hours after the crash showed that the plane had stopped transmitting its positional time at 6:11 p.m local time but continued to transmit other data including altitude until 6:20 p.m in the plane's last minute of flight it climbed and Dove several times peing at an hour altitude of 30,000 ft before pitching forward into a dive of 8,000 ft per minute then the plane's transponder went quiet for good with those Clues we can at least glean some insight into what pran's final moments may have looked like and what his assassins might have done in order to kill him according to CNN Aerospace analyst Mars Brien interviewed after progan had been confirmed dead multiple factors suggest that some sort of explosion was to blame the missing vertical stabilizer the spinning and trailed smoke as the plane fell to the ground and the plane appearing to be on fire even before it impacted the ground whether that hit came from a bomb inside the aircraft or a missile is unclear but the planes climbs and Dives PR of the explosion wouldn't make sense if the passengers had discovered a bomb on board taking into account the lack of trails that would indicate a surface to air missile the next open question is whether Russian military planes perhaps with their own transponders off may have been in the area after all fighter jets could easily have been long gone by the time the falling plane was captured on video but the final Factor the fact that the plan's transponder became partially blocked from transmitting data a full 9 minutes before the crash would suggest that the plane entered an area where its Communications were actively jammed but simply it appears the progan in his plane flew into a trap but whose trap was it now the obvious choice of course is Vladimir Putin by this point it should be more than apparent that Putin's got a track record for this sort of thing and it's important to note that such a public demise for his greatest rival inside Russia is exactly the sort of deterrent that Putin seems to think will cow the rest of his associates into submission at the time of the crash Putin was at a public event and was noted as appearing somewhat pleased with we assume the general way that his day was going although we do need to qualify that this is pleased on the Putin scale the man with about the same range of facial expressions as a Russian nesting doll and in a potentially related piece of news Russia had announced earlier the same day that a prian Ally within the Russian mod General Sergey sikin had been relieved of his duties as a military commander survin is believed to be under house arrest but has not been seen in public or even confirmed alive since the day of march on Moscow an act that apparently Surin was given advanced notice about when adding Surin or at least his job title to the August 23rd body count today's events look eily like a purge of the Russian military world of course there's also the possibility that Ukraine might have been behind the assassination the nation was due to Mark its independence day one day after pran's plane was brought down and between Ukraine's clearly demonstrated capacity for sabotage and its ability to sneak aerial drones into the nearby Russian capital city of Moscow it's not inconceivable that Ukraine might have had the reach to take out prosan themselves decapitating the Vagner group will never not be a good thing for Ukraine especially after the countless war crimes Varner has committed on Ukrainian soil now we do have to stress here that Ukraine is far less able to exert this sort of lethal influence inside Russia than well Russia but it's far for an impossibility and thirdly there's the possibility that whatever assassination did take place was carried out by the Russian modd directly either with Putin's tacid approval but minimal involvement or of the mod's own valtion defense min Mr shyu and general Valerie jimo have both demonstrated that they would be more than happy to see prian meet an unfortunate end and now with prian out of play as a military actor Putin needs his mod leaders as much as they need him it's not out of the question that that level of influence might have given the Russian mod the Expendable political Capital they would need to carry out that sort of operation and get away with it especially considering that even if Putin were to be ideologically opposed for some reason a dead Yi progan does still serve his interests nonetheless around the world the news has been met largely with nonchalant acceptance seen as much more an internal Russian matter than anything world leaders would really have to weigh in on American President Joe Biden said pran's death I don't know for a fact what happens but I'm not surprised there's not much that happens in Russia that Putin's not behind said Ukrainian presidential Aid Mao poak Putin was waiting for the moment it is also obvious that progan signed a special death warrant for himself the moment he believed in Lucas shenk's bizarre gu anes and Putin's equally absurd word of Honor or take the words of Polish foreign minister zigal quote it so happens that political opponents whom Vladimir Putin considers a threat to his power do not die naturally and what can we say right [Music] on well the end of yeni progan and Demitri yuken might be the end of the Vagner group itself at least in the long Arc of history but it'll take some time to get to that long Arc and in the intervening weeks and months Vagner is an issue that Russia will have to deal with sooner rather than later at present most remaining vagna Fighters are stationed in Russia's neighboring country of bellarus while handfuls are dispatched around the world in small or midsize units for all sorts of work that we mentioned earlier on protecting diamond mines bodyguarding foreign leaders committing the wholesale Slaughter of civilians you know that sort of thing according to former CIA director Leon Panetta the Russian mod may attempt to take over the Vagner group directly incorporating its into the proper Russian military rather than let the group keep operating with a level of autonomy what that means for the interests Vagner protects around the world is unclear after all a big part of the reason the vagda group protects them is because the Russian government would rather not take responsibility for what is generally seen as nefarious and subversive acts but there's also no indicator and certainly no reason to believe that the Vagner group will take this line down although Akin and progan were both spiritual leaders to the mercenary group and akkin was also a very real tactical and strategic leader they're nowhere near the only people involved in the Vagner group who are capable of calling the shots immediately after prion was confirmed dead sources in bellarus indicated that Vagner convoys were headed on mass to the Russian border despite the work of bellerian special operators attempting to get in their way what that means what they might want and whether they're even planning to remain a part of a separate entity known as Vagner is yet unknown but what seems fairly clear is that the Vagner group is unlikely to resist the tides of the Russian mod for much longer it's not totally inconceivable that Putin pulls some sort of bait and switch relieving Sergey sikin of his military duties only to install him as the V the group's next leader but to call such an outcome unlikely would be an understatement unfortunately for the people of Ukraine it's unlikely that pran's death will have any meaningful impact on Russia's war effort as a whole although the Varner group has been an instrumental part of battles like the one that took place in and around the town of bakut they've already been pushed out of Ukraine following pran's attempt on Moscow meaning that the Russian war effort as it exists right now is not reliant on Vagner Fighters if anything prian and Akin deaths May disabuse some Vagner fighters from their faith in their mercenary organization and incentivize them to join the fold alongside Russia soldiers as many ukrainians see it according to the BBC the best case scenario from pran's Death would be a degradation of Russia's own internal stability perhaps even to the point that the country might be on track to an implosion as Putin is forced to take more and more drastic measures to cling to power and lastly there's the question of what all this means for Vladimir Putin who still sits as the grand Puppet Master behind all things in Russia in the short term this play appears to strengthen Putin's position it is a bold unmistakable statement that he holds absolute power in Russia and that his authority is not to be fed with by any person under any circumstance it's easy to underestimate the importance of a basic scare tactic in World politics but sometimes there's simply nothing like it and now Putin can face his elites with with a simple reality it will cost them far less and be far less dangerous to them personally to Simply go along with the expectations and confines that Putin sets out but at the same time there's the opposite reality that such Brazen AXS of Violence by Putin if indeed he is responsible for the death of progan are the acts of a desperate man who's running out of options as political scienti as Brian clar put it in a piece for the Atlantic this tends to create two sorts of problems for a dictator in Putin's position but this trusted Elites realizing that they must not be so trusted and might not be so immune from their dictators whims it's likely that a culture of mistrust and paranoia will begin to take off and in Russia's case that sort of culture wasn't unheard of anyway in that sort of environment more and more of those Elites will begin to do the maths on whether it's worth continuing to back Putin or whether they've entered into a situation where either the dictator or they will survive to see the following year add to that the higher likelihood that Russian officials will want to avoid pran's mistakes most prominently being open and honest about the truth of Russia's invasion in Ukraine lose that honesty and Putin becomes far more prone to unforced errors which for a guy who thought he' take over Ukraine in a span of a few days really isn't a thing that you'd want to happen more frequently than it already does every political action has a cost and for Vladimir Putin it may well be that the cost of assassinating progan is worth bearing but it goes to show the rate at which once trusted allies of the Russian president are now turning into enemies Canon fodder Exiles dissidents and in the case of progan and Atkin corpses suffer those sorts of costs for long and Putin's war in Ukraine will become well and truly unwinable suffer the costs for long enough and Putin will one day find himself without allies to call upon the next time somebody decides to attempt a coup in the aftermath of pran's death that count of allies hasn't just dropped by a few it's dropped by thousands upon thousands of members of the Varner group how long the Russian war effort can survive with without them remains to be seen But as the ghost of yevi progan now glares over Putin's shoulder at the battlefields of Ukraine it becomes abundantly clear that if this war effort runs in a way where even Putin's closest Associates of targets on their back then the same war effort simply cannot last forever