Prigozhin’s death a window on a Kremlin addicted to war

Yevgeny Prigozhin with Vladimir Putin in 2010. It’s believed the Russian leader was involved in the death of the Wagner boss.

To defenestrate or not defenestrate? That is the question.

Peering into the murk of Russian politics, Yevgeny Prigozhin would appear to have escaped a nasty trip and fall accident or an inexplicable explosive emergence through a pane of glass and onto the street below from his mansion in St Petersburg.

We know Prigozhin was on the passenger manifest. We know that a private jet flew from Moscow airport bound for Prigozhin’s hometown and was filmed in flames crashing to Earth 140 kilometres northwest of Moscow in a wood near the village of Kuzhenkino. We also know that Vladimir Putin expressed condolences to those killed in the crash. The Russian President described Prigozhin as a “talented man” who had “made mistakes.”

Presumably organising a failed coup falls into that category.

We also know that Prigozhin’s Wagner Group deputy, Dmitry Utkin was on the passenger manifest, too.

Two birds, one stone, possibly.

A private plane crashed in Moscow's Tver region on Thursday, with Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin on the list of passengers.

On July 22, another arrest was made which gives us a clearer idea of what is really going on in the Kremlin. Igor Girkin, the man convicted in absentia in the Dutch courts and handed a life sentence for his role in downing flight M17 where all passengers and crew – 298 people in total, 27 of them Australians, died when the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile.

In 2014, Girkin, along with Sergey Dubinskiy and Leonid Kharchenko, transferred a BUK missile launcher across the Russian border and into a field in Donetsk.

After M17 was hit, Girkin wrote on a social media post hastily deleted, “We warned them not to fly in our sky.”

That appalling crime has been all but forgotten. We should never forget and never forgive.

Now Girkin is in a Russian prison, not for the mass murder of 298 innocents. Nor for the murder and mayhem he committed in Chechnya where he earned the nickname, Igor the Terrible. He was feted, not condemned for his role in the annexure of Crimea and was announced the Supreme Commander of the Donetsk People’s Republic, despite having no cultural links to Eastern Ukraine.

Girkin has been charged with extremism. Which is another way of saying he dared criticise Putin. A month ago he was filmed sitting behind glass in a Moscow courtroom, looking dazed and confused.

Girkin and Prigozhin were also sworn enemies. While Prigozhin used his Telegram media to furiously vent on Russia’s military chiefs, Girkin turned his attention to Prigozhin’s military tactics, using shock troops, many of them convicted murderers, describing the infantry assaults as “mediocre.”

Like Prigozhin, Girkin became critical of Russia’s Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, regularly ranting on his blogs and in interviews on Russian media over perceived logistical and tactical mistakes.

So far, so safe.

Igor Girkin, also know as Igor Strelkov, the former military chief for Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine - and the man responsible for downing M17.

Girkin then turned his attention to Putin. In June, Girkin called for Putin to step aside as the leader of the Russian Federation, arguing his boss was not the best person to lead the Russian Federation in wartime.

At this point, Girkin probably knew better than to linger in front of windows, peering into the Moscow skyline. In any event, there was no immediate response from the Kremlin.

Two weeks later, possibly emboldened, the 59-year-old former military commander took to Telegram and turned his disapproval on Vladimir Putin.

“For 23 years, the country was led by a low-life who managed to ‘blow dust in the eyes’ of a significant part of the population. Now he is the last island of legitimacy and stability of the state. But the country will not survive another six years of this cowardly mediocrity in power,” Girkin wrote.

Three days later he was bundled into the back of a truck outside his Moscow home. The vision of his appearance in court showed Girkin looking uncomfortable, even surprised that Putin’s murderous regime doesn’t take kindly to criticism.

Karmic retribution for killing 298 commercial air travellers, 80 of them children, it may be, but Girkin’s arrest provides an insight into what is happening in the Kremlin and more broadly Russia.

A member of Wagner pays tribute to Prigozhin at the makeshift memorial in front of the PMC Wagner office in Novosibirsk.

There are no white knights left in Russia. They are all dead, in jail, or in exile. There are no sensible people who point to Russia’s GDP per capita and see Russians getting poorer, a sliding scale that began with a peak in and around the annexure of Crimea, and has been going backwards ever since. There are no people with the wisdom to acknowledge that even if the Russian military withdrew to pre-invasion boundaries, the country would continue to be an economic pariah for at least a decade.

There is only a warring group of ultranationalists whose points of difference are the minutiae of strategy, tactics and logistics around the ill-fated invasion of Ukraine. These are war junkies who pine for constant conflict with Europe. Be it monsters like Prigozhin, Girkin, or Shoigu and Army General Valery Gerasimov, no one is calling for peace. No one is prepared to negotiate a settlement.

The lesson is that even if Putin himself was defenestrated metaphorically or actually, war would not end. Indeed it could get worse with war in the Ukraine extending to the Baltic States.

Russia, once described by the late Arizona senator John McCain as a “gas station pretending to be a country”, has no white hats left, no one to shake the nation into sanity.