(Dobbs) Has Putin Had His Revenge?
If he has, he has sent a message to all who've ever spoken out against him.
If you’ve seen the news about the plane crash not a hundred miles from Moscow in which apparently the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has died, there are a few things to think about.
First, there’s always the possibility that it was an airborne mishap. Of course there’s also always the possibility that the Arizona Cardinals will win the next Super Bowl. The odds of both are small. Given the history of Vladimir Putin, who has reached far outside Russia’s borders to poison and kill his rivals, the crash has all the hallmarks of the Russian president’s pitiless petulance, and pulling it off so close to his own capital would have been one of his easier hits. As President Biden said today when he learned of the crash, “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
Second, if you are one of those rivals who has so far survived, you’d better be looking over your shoulder. Both shoulders, in fact. Prigozhin led a rebellion in June against Putin’s chain of command, after which Putin called him a traitor, then he was sent into exile in Belarus. But he didn’t stay, and he even met with Putin in the Kremlin not long afterward during a meeting with some of his key Wagner Group commanders. Just yesterday a video even emerged from what appears to be an African desert, with Prigozhin apparently recruiting soldiers for his mercenary army, which helps fill Putin’s pockets.
Whatever the reason, he seemed to somehow survive his ill-considered revolt.
But CIA director Bill Burns predicted that Yevgeny Prigozhin was not out of the woods. “In my experience,” Burns said, “Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback.”
That’s why, after the mutiny fizzled, there were jokes about Prigozhin’s longevity. Jokes like, if he’s smart, he won’t open any packages he gets in the mail. Or, he’d better not stand anywhere near a window. Even President Biden got in on the act: “I’d be careful what I eat.”
But now it seems, along with six other passengers and a three-person crew, and two months to the day after his rebellion fell apart, Prigozhin is dead. Not from a meal, not from a package, not from an open window. It’s from an airplane, a business jet, that was cruising smoothly on a stable flight path when it fell from the sky.
If Putin was behind it, Prigozhin’s not even his first casualty today. The Russian state news agency reported this morning that General Sergey Surovikin, the brutal head of Russia’s forces in Syria who earned the nickname there of “General Armageddon,” then six months after the poorly executed invasion of Ukraine, the man given the reins of the Russian invasion force, has been fired.
Rumors had gone around for a while that he was tied to Prigozhin and had even known of the Wagner Group mutiny in advance. He hadn’t been seen since the failed rebellion and now is out of power altogether. If he’s lucky, that’s as bad as it will get.
Of course there will a probe of the plane crash. The Russian version of our National Transportation Safety Board, Rosaviation, says that it has created a special commission which "has begun investigating the circumstances and causes of the accident.” Any bets that its conclusions will not point toward Putin?
So the last thing to think about is, if you’re a private jet pilot in Moscow, and you’re ever assigned to fly someone who is on Vladimir Putin’s bad side, call in sick.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Despots always depend on like minded cohorts to do their bidding. Too bad there are not more people around Putin as there were close to Caesar.
Yes, exactly my view. Thanks Greg.
While he fled briefly to Minsk after failing he booked the only hotel without windows... Vlad always gets his man.... hundreds of thousands of them