Oleg Vernyk, Leader of the “Zahist Pratsi” Independent Trade Union of Ukraine – Ukrainian Socialist League
On August 23, 2023, the news of the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the infamous Wagner Private Military Company, spread around the world. His death was commented on by the most influential statesmen of the capitalist world, from Vladimir Putin to Joe Biden. Interest in Prigozhin’s personality only increases after his death, as it is also shrouded in a wealth of secrets. Prigozhin’s Embraer Legacy 600 business jet on the way from Moscow and St. Petersburg exploded in mid-air and everyone on board the plane died…
Yevgeny Prigozhin started his life in Putin’s hometown – St. Petersburg. Since the 90s, their life paths crossed and business cooperation took shape. After Prigozhin served 9 years in prison, he became an “authority” among the city’s criminal community, and Putin, as a city official and KGB officer, controlled all the key economic departments of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. In 1990s Russia, the close intertwining of criminal mafia and corrupt bureaucracy was the most common and widespread phenomenon.
In the early 2000s, Yevgeny Prigozhin, taking advantage of his close relationship with Putin, became a billionaire and greatly developed his business in different directions. In 2012, with Putin’s blessing, he created the Wagner Private Military Company to pursue the political and commercial interests of the Russian Federation in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Wagner units have been active in many countries around the world – Libya, Syria, Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Madagascar and Venezuela.
After the failure of the Russian army’s blitzkrieg offensive in Ukraine in March 2022, Putin approached Prigozhin and Wagner’s PMC with an offer to participate in the invasion of Ukraine. He responded to this proposal and already in the spring of 2022, Prigozhin’s units participated in the Russian army’s offensive in the Donetsk region. Prigozhin’s division distinguished itself above all by capturing such relatively small Donbass towns as Popasnaya, Soledar and Bakhmut. Putin allowed Prigozhin to freely recruit prisoners in prisons all over Russia for PMC Wagner and the war in Ukraine.
However, already in autumn, the whole world watched as serious conflicts began between Yevgeny Prigozhin and the leadership of the Russian army. Prigozhin felt that, as part of internal competition, the leadership of the Russian army decided to bleed his unit in battles with the Ukrainian army. He began openly stating that Russian Defense Minister Shoigu and Russian Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov did not give his unit enough ammunition, which condemned Wagner to heavy losses.
After the capture of the town of Bakhmut, Prigozhin announced that Wagner was going to the rear to rest and left the front line. At the same time, he made several sensational public statements that it was Russia that launched the war against Ukraine. He also claimed that the Russian government lied to the Russian people about the real motives of this war and aggression against Ukraine. In fact, at that time he became the informal leader of the “patriotic opposition”, which had previously been loyal to the Russian authorities and personally to Putin.
Putin and his entourage felt a serious threat from Prigozhin and gave the order to reassign Wagner directly to the Russian Defense Ministry and neutralize or even eliminate those who disagreed with this.
Prigozhin learned of this decision of the authorities and organized the so-called “March of Justice” to Moscow, which was attended by about 5,000 fighters of the PMC “Wagner”. The march to Moscow was stopped by the efforts of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who gave Prigozhin security guarantees and promised to transfer the entire Wagner PMC to Belarus. Which was then done. Several thousand of Prigozhin’s fighters camped in Belarus and participated in the training of Belarusian army soldiers. Prigozhin himself, apparently, was quite satisfied with the outcome of his confrontation with the Russian generals and was going to transfer the entire Wagner staff from Belarus to Africa. However, August 23, 2023 was the last day of his life. What happened and who is behind the assassination of Prigozhin and the entire Wagner leadership?
Virtually all Western analysts have pointed to Putin as the only likely culprit behind Prigozhin’s assassination. Prigozhin’s coup d’etat of June 23-24, 2023 was the strongest blow to Putin’s domestic and international authority. During the “march to Moscow” not a single military unit sided with the Russian authorities. Putin appeared for the first time before Russian society as a pitiful and frightened old man. It was a profound humiliation Putin had never experienced before. Of course, under these circumstances, his desire to take revenge on Prigozhin for his humiliation was quite understandable for the dictator.
Most analysts adhere to this version. However, there are some other marginal versions of events. Russian opposition analyst Andrei Piontkovsky believes that it was not profitable for Putin to destroy Prigozhin, as this would automatically mean in the consciousness of the masses that he does not keep his word about the security guarantees he gave Prigozhin during negotiations to stop Wagner’s campaign against Moscow. He believes that this assassination was committed by the oligarchic opposition to Putin, with the aim of further weakening his power and discrediting him as a person. Of course, this discrediting also affected Belarusian President Lukashenko, who also gave security guarantees to Prigozhin during negotiations to stop the coup.
Opposition analyst Valery Solovey believes that we are facing a simulated assassination of Prigozhin. That is, in his opinion, Prigozhin survived, as he was warned about the impending assassination attempt and did not board this plane. Another opposition analyst, Sergei Zhirnov, believes that on August 23, 2023, Prigozhin had already been killed on Putin’s orders and his corpse was thrown into the wreckage of the crashed plane. However, all these hypotheses are extremely marginal and do not change the general logic of the analysis of this situation.
For many years, Putin’s power has succumbed to its sacralization and Prigozhin destroyed it in just a few days. Prigozhin gained immense popularity in Russia as a man who decided to engage in an open struggle with the authorities. The whole world was surrounded by images of Rostov residents embracing and being photographed with Wagner’s fighters. Quite unexpectedly, the mood of protest in Russia began to focus on Prigozhin’s personality, and Putin did not at all understand where this situation could ultimately lead. The liberal-bourgeois opposition has long since passed the peak of its popularity in Russia. The so-called “leftist” opposition represented by the “Communist Party of the Russian Federation” has long been closely integrated with the Putin regime. But the conditionally “patriotic” electorate quickly began to become disillusioned with Putin and increasingly turned to the charismatic Prigozhin, the hero of the “capture of Bakhmut” and “fighter for justice”.
Prigozhin’s death did not complete any of the key political processes in contemporary Russia. On the contrary, it only exacerbated and exaggerated all the problems facing Putin’s government in mid-2023. Huge state budget expenditures for war, a sharp depreciation of the ruble, a systemic crisis of economic production, exacerbated by a sharp decline in oil and gas export revenues, and severe economic sanctions …
The crisis of Russian imperialism is obviously related to the crises of Western and Chinese imperialism. However, it seems that it is Russian capitalism that may act in the very near future as a kind of “weak link” in the world imperialist system. But Yevgeny Prigozhin will no longer see this, it seems…
