Wagner warlord’s reported death is straight out of Putin’s blood-spilling playbook

The most Googled name on Wednesday night in America — other than the 38-year-old GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian warlord who commanded the murderous mercenary squad called The Wagner Group. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s reported sudden death in a plane crash near the village of Kuzhenkino in Russia’s Tver Region briefly hijacked the U.S. news cycle, which was supposed to be focused on the GOP debates. 

Preliminary intelligence analysis indicates that the deadly crash of the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet that carried Prigozhin and nine other passengers was not accidental. Rather, the aircraft was brought down by a surface-to-air missile strike originating from inside Russia, by a bomb-explosion on the aircraft or via another form of sabotage, according to U.S. government officials.

Regardless of a specific method, as a Russia watcher who spent my intelligence career investigating Russian intelligence tradecraft and analyzing President Vladimir Putin, my assessment is that Prigozhin’s death was likely a hit job orchestrated by the Russian state. It was probably authorized by Putin himself. 

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While Prigozhin was a loyalist throughout his more than two-decades-long relationship with Putin, the Wagner leader likely lost Putin’s trust, following the so-called “March of Justice,” which Prigozhin led in June, threatening to overthrow some key leaders in the Russian military establishment. Putin subsequently called the march, which was abruptly called off by Prigozhin, an “armed insurrection,” “a knife stab in the back,” and “treason.” 

A former KGB operative, Putin has always been unambiguous about treason and traitors, who, in his view, deserve severe punishment. “Treason is the biggest crime on earth, and traitors must be punished,” the Russian strongman famously said in an interview with the Financial Times in June 2019. He was commenting on the poisoning of a former GRU officer and double agent who spied for Western intelligence, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. “I am not saying that it’s necessary to punish in [the] way that was done in Salisbury, added Putin, “not at all. But, nevertheless, traitors must be punished.”

Indeed, there are multiple punishment tools in Putin’s playbook. It is underpinned by an entire doctrine called “Wet Deeds” (mokryye dela, in Russian), which was developed by Soviet intelligence, to eliminate “the enemies of the state.” “Wet deeds” — also translated as “wet affairs” or “wet works” — are targeted assassinations, bearing a codename that refers to the spilling of blood. 

They include killings, kidnappings, poisonings, “forced suicides” and other acts of intimidation and murder. Practiced as a statecraft during the early days of the U.S.S.R., wet deeds were ordered at the highest levels of the Soviet government. They were was Lenin’s, and especially Stalin’s, favorite tools—deployed by the Cheka and its successors the GRU, NKVD, and KGB—to “liquidate” (likvidirovat) persons perceived as a threat to the regime. 

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The most high-profile “wet deeds” ordered by Soviet intelligence were the assassination of the Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Leon Trotsky, a Red Army hero and Stalin’s archrival, was murdered with an ice axe in August 1940 by a Spanish Communist Ramon Mercader, code name “Raymond,” in secret Operation Utka (“Duck”), carried out under the supervision of a seasoned and ruthless Soviet intelligence operative, an “illegal” sleeper agent named Nahum Eitington.

Pope John Paul II, who, in addition to being pontiff, was a Polish anti-communist, was gravely wounded in May 1981 by a Turkish assassin in St. Peter’s Square in Rome while riding in an open car. The assassin, reportedly an asset of Bulgarian intelligence, was said to be carrying out a plot masterminded by the Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, having shocked millions of Catholics around the world.

Putin has renewed the practice of “wet deeds,” giving the tactic an innocuous name of “special tasks.” He made the practice legal by approving a federal law, “On Countering Extreme Activity,” in 2002, two and a half years after he assumed the presidency. Updated in 2006, it legalizes targeted assassinations as punishment for “extremist activity,” which is defined very broadly, giving the Kremlin flexibility in its application. 

Scores of Russian journalists and numerous political opposition leaders have been victims of “wet affairs” because they criticized Putin or the Russian regime or exposed the corruption and other misdeeds of the Russian government. 

Among such modern-day, high-profile murders have been the killing of Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov. A Russian journalist and Putin critic, Politkovskaya reported on the atrocities of Russian forces during the Second Chechen War (1999–2009) and was shot and killed in her apartment elevator on Putin’s birthday in October 2006. Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader and Putin’s ardent critic, was shot on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015.

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In addition to crude methods — such as shootings, stabbings and staging car accidents or suicides like throwing a victim out of a window — “wet deeds” include more creative ways of eliminating the enemies of the Kremlin.  

In 1938, Pavel Sudoplatov, who was behind the plot to assassinate Trotsky, killed a Ukrainian nationalist on Stalin’s orders. The murder weapon was a box of chocolates containing a bomb. 

Ratcheting up the sophistication, death by poisoning is Russia’s all-time favorite. Although it requires special technical skills, precise dosing, and careful selection of a suitable type of poison, the Russians are attracted to this method because it can be executed clandestinely, without the noisy drama that comes with a handgun, an ice axe or a bomb explosion. 

The most high-profile cases of poisonings conducted likely on Putin’s orders, in addition to those of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, have been those of Alexander Litvinenko and Alexei Navalny, both Putin’s critics. Litvinenko, a former FSB intelligence officer who defected to England and did contract work for British intelligence, was murdered in 2006 by two Russian GRU operatives. They arranged a meeting with their victim in a luxury London hotel and served him a cup of tea laced with the radioactive agent polonium. Navalny was poisoned in 2020 with a Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, placed in his underwear by operatives from the Russian domestic security service, the FSB, but he survived. 

The Russians perfected their various poison-derived murder weapons so that the symptoms often mirror natural human ailments—such as a heart attack or gastritis—and it appears that the person died from “natural causes.”

Stealthiness, i.e., leaving no trace of foul play, is a top requirement for special tasks, whether it’s poisonings or an aircraft crash that killed Prigozhin. 

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According to a 1993 CIA document, even “in cases where the Soviet hand is obvious, investigation often produces only fragmentary information, due to the KGB’s ability to camouflage its trail.” It is for this reason, that even the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies may not be able to determine the exact method that killed Prigozhin. The spokesperson for the Pentagon, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, stated on Thursday, in a briefing with the journalists, that Prigozhin was “likely killed” in the plane crash but declined to comment on how the killing was accomplished. 

Whether the U.S. government is able to make a conclusive judgment on Prigozhin’s death, one thing is clear: KGB spymaster Putin would go as far as “liquidating” his top loyalist and self-proclaimed patriot of Mother-Russia, in order to cement his hold on power.

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