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On August 23, an Embraer jet carrying Wagner mercenary group head Yevgeney Prigozhin fell from the sky over Russia's Tver region while en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. The incident occurred on the eve of the two-month anniversary of a June 24 mutiny that had seen Wagner fighters seize control of the Russia Southern Military District Headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don. On that day, a separate column of Wagner fighters drove towards Moscow, ultimately turning back after coming within 120 miles of the capital.
In the weeks since, much international discussion has focused on the seeming inaction of Russia's security services in the face of an armed uprising aimed at compelling the removal of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, two long-time Putin loyalists who had been involved in a months-long feud with Prigozhin.
However, while there is every indication that Russian state actors were responsible for causing the plane crash that killed Prigozhin last week, a closer examination of the events of June 24 suggests that the Kremlin's role in neutralizing the threat posed by Prigozhin's "march for justice" back in June was greater than has been generally appreciated.
"Some commentators were too confident in making claims that the Russian security agencies didn't do anything to stop the uprising," Alec Bertina, an all source analyst with Grey Dynamics, told Newsweek.
While it is true that Russian border guards on the morning of June 24 did not make a serious attempt to stop Wagner columns as they crossed back into the country from Ukraine, and that Russia's National Guard, the Rosgvardiya, did not militarily engage Wagner columns either in Rostov or on the road towards Moscow later that day, less obvious signs of Russian state action were visible within hours of the start of the mutiny.
The first clear, publicly available indication that a direct challenge to the Kremlin's authority was imminent came shortly before 10 p.m. local time on the evening of June 23. At 9:48 p.m., Prigozhin released a video that he claimed showed the aftereffects of a Russian rocket attack on a Wagner camp in Ukraine. At 9:56 p.m., he followed it up with an audio message announcing the Wagner Group's decision that "the evil being done by the country's military leadership must be stopped." At 9:59 p.m., he called on Russian regular army soldiers to join his movement to restore "justice" in the country's armed forces.
By shortly after midnight, however, it appeared that the Russian authorities had already begun taking action. At 12:18 a.m. on June 24, just over two hours after Prigozhin publicly signaled his intention to challenge the country's military leadership, the Telegram channel of Rossiya-1 war correspondent Andrey Rudenko posted a video message featuring General Sergey Surovikin, who had widely been viewed as one of Prigozhin's most likely allies within the Ministry of Defense.
The video, filmed in front of a textured white wall, featured a very uncomfortable-looking Surovikin holding what appeared to be a submachine gun on his lap while explaining that, "I was just ordered back from the front by the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation." Surovikin went on to "appeal to the leadership, commanders, and fighters of PMC Wagner...to halt your columns before it is too late."
At 12:31 a.m., Rudenko released a second video address filmed in front of what appeared to be the same textured white wall. This time, it was General Vladimir Alekseyev, another potential Prigozin ally, asking Wagner Group fighters to "imagine the joy your attempted actions are creating in the West." Alekseyev went on to call the mutiny "a stab in the back to the country and the president," warning that "a civil war could break out."
While no clear proof has emerged establishing that the two Prigozhin-friendly generals' early morning video addresses were in fact filmed at the strong insistence of Russia's security services, Surovikin was soon placed under house arrest. He was formally relieved of his role as commander-in-chief of the country's aerospace forces on August 23, mere hours before the private jet carrying Prigozhin crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Alekseyev has not been seen in public since his appearance in a video put out by Prigozhin after Wagner forces temporarily seized the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don on the morning of June 24.
"We don't know exactly what the FSB did," Bertina said, speaking of Russia's domestic security agency, which Putin himself headed from July 1998 through March 1999. "All we know is that in the opening hours of Prigozhin's march, we saw a video of General Surovikin, visibly shaken, holding a submachine gun on his lap and calling on Wagner forces to cease and desist at a moment when no one else from the elite was coming out on their own initiative to support the president."
The generals' appeals were not the only sign that the Kremlin was prepared to face a challenge from Yevgeney Prigozhin. Despite his cult following among some of Russia's most nationalist elements, prior to June 24 Prigozhin's name had never been uttered as part of a scripted broadcast on Russia's Kremlin-controlled First Channel.
That reality abruptly changed at 1:30 a.m. on the day of the mutiny, when lead news anchor Yekaterina Andreyeva was brought into the studio to host a five-minute special segment that mentioned Prigozhin's name 15 times. Whatever was happening in the country, the Kremlin clearly wanted the Russian public to know that it was being done by Yevgeney Viktorovich Prigozhin.
Despite the clear signals that the authorities in Moscow were aware of his plans, however, Prigozhin continued to move forward. At 2:03 a.m. local time on June 24, he announced in another Telegram audio message that "we've crossed the border, and the guards came out and hugged our fighters. Now we're entering Rostov." He went on to say that "we'll destroy anything that stands in our way... We're going further. We're going all the way."
Although the Wagner column did proceed to shoot down six Russian military helicopters and one surveillance airplane on its way toward Moscow on the afternoon of June 24, the "march for justice" did not succeed in attracting the levels of support from the regular military that might have given the mutineers a fighting chance against the Rosgvardia and special forces units setting up defenses on the outskirts of the capital. While Prigozhin's death by plane crash on August 23 appears to have convinced some Russian hardliners that the mercenary leader's real mistake was to order his column to turn around rather than "to go all the way," by the evening of June 24, it seems that the latter option was not actually available to him.
"The column that was driving towards Moscow consisted of between 4,000 to 5,000 troops and between 200 and 250 vehicles," George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War told Newsweek. "If they were going to have to fight through serious resistance in order to actually enter the city, then they would have needed to attract significant defections along the way, and they clearly didn't do that."
While it remains unknowable exactly how decisive a role the early morning addresses of generals Surovikin and Alekseyev played in convincing other potentially dissatisfied elements within the Russian regular military to remain onside with the president, the mutiny's aftermath witnessed a Kremlin-directed media campaign aimed at discrediting Prigozhin in the eyes of the Russian public.
"On June 24, Kremlin-controlled domestic media started attacking absolutely everything associated with Prigozhin," Kateryna Stepanenko, an information space analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Newsweek. "They were showing the videos from law enforcement's search of his mansion, debunking the June 23 video that Prigozhin said proved that the Ministry of Defense has attacked the Wagner camp, and bringing up his history as a petty criminal during the 1980s."
The propaganda initiative appeared to have its desired effect. According to polling conducted by the Levada Center, approval among the Russian public for Prigozhin's actions dropped from 30 percent before the mutiny to 11 percent in the immediate aftermath of June 24.
However, on July 10, the Russian media smear campaign ended as abruptly as it had begun.
"After a couple of weeks of this, Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, announced that Prigozhin and the president had met for several hours on June 29," Stepanenko explained, "and essentially immediately after that announcement, state channels dropped the subject."
"It was almost as if Peskov's statement had been an order to stop talking about Prigozhin," she added.
Over the next six weeks, as Western commentators struggled to understand how it could be that Prigozhin had seemingly gotten away with his abortive march on Moscow, Kremlin-controlled media remained largely silent on the topic.
The events of August 23 did not markedly change this reality. In the hours and days after the plane crash, while Western airwaves were full of speculation as to who had ordered Prigozhin dead—if, in fact, the whole spectacle were not part of an elaborate Kremlin disinformation plot—Russian state media instead focused on Putin's participation in events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the WWII Battle of Kursk, the 15th annual BRICS summit in South Africa, and examples of Russian success in forestalling Ukrainian counteroffensive operations aimed at severing Moscow's land bridge to Crimea.
On August 23, the 9 o'clock evening news on Russia's First Channel featured a 40-second segment announcing that "the crash of a private airplane in Tver region has killed 10 people." The anchor noted that the official passenger list "contained the name and surname Yevgeny Prigozhin." The segment was the 13th out of the 16 stories that ran as part of the hour-long broadcast. It appeared between a three-minute clip hailing the opening of a new bridge in a Chechen mountain village and a brief update on flooding in the Russian Far East.
The following night, a four-minute segment on developments in the investigation into the cause of the airplane crash noted that the name of "Prigozhin Yevgeney," written in English, had been found on the flight manifest. As part of the segment, president Putin was seen "expressing his sincere condolences to the families of all the victims."
"After Prigozhin's death, state media was very matter-of-fact," Stepanenko noted. "It was only after Putin himself spoke of Prigozhin in the past tense that the discussion started to open up a little bit."
That "discussion," however, featured one very conspicuous absence.
"Russian state media would criticize any Western publication that has suggested Putin was involved in the crash in any way," Stepanenko explained. "They have claimed that that Ukraine might have been behind it, or that the plane simply malfunctioned, but almost no one raised the possibility that the Russian president himself might have played a role."
Western analysts have largely reached a very different conclusion as to Putin's potential involvement.
"It's our assessment that the Kremlin most likely shot down the private jet with a surface-to-air missile," Barros said.
"It's consistent with what the local residents in Tver reported seeing in terms of smoke plumes, and it's also poetic," he continued. "The Wagner plane went down on the 23rd of August, two months after Prigozhin's 'march of justice' shot down several Russian military aircraft using surface-to-air missiles. Presumably, Putin gave the green light, and then Gerasimov and Shoigu got to pull the trigger using their own air defense system."
Neither the Kremlin nor the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Newsweek's request for comment.
Inside Russia itself, it appears that anyone who might have been tempted to follow Prigozhin's example and foment an armed rebellion against the Kremlin powers-that-be has been reminded that such behavior is still fraught with risk.
"Among the elite, everyone got the message," a Moscow-based political analyst who asked to remain anonymous, told Newsweek. "They saw that you can't trust any sort of deal struck with Putin, that force is the only argument the Kremlin has left."
