Stalin had a favorite slogan to elucidate why he murdered rivals for energy. ‘No man, no problem,’ the Soviet dictator stated.
Today, Vladimir Putin, who sits at Stalin’s desk within the Kremlin, could be savouring the mass assassin’s favorite aphorism.
Wednesday’s dramatic airplane crash and the reported dying of warmonger Yevgeny Prigozhin and his key aides – who ran the sinister Wagner Group of mercenaries – actually seems to have been a score-settling straight out of the playbook of the unlamented ‘Man of Steel’.
But now a number of questions come up. Has Putin secured himself in energy? With the elimination of the person, has the issue gone away? And what does Prigozhin’s dying imply for the Wagner Group – which only some weeks in the past got here inside a whisker of mounting a revolutionary assault on Moscow?
There is one key distinction between Putin and Stalin. The Soviet chief purged his generals earlier than the warfare, not in the midst of one. And when, two months in the past, Prigozhin launched his short-lived, ill-fated mutiny, he shattered Putin’s picture because the unchallenged boss of Russia.
Now the dictator’s preliminary – and unprecedented – forgiveness of such defiance appears merely like one other chess transfer. Putin pounced when the Wagner boss was simply feeling safe once more, and was again doing the president’s soiled work for him.
In Wednesday’s crash, Putin additionally seems to have taken out Dmitry Utkin, who co-founded Wagner and named it after Hitler’s favorite composer as a result of, in line with the investigative web site Bellingcat, he had ‘an obsessive fascination with the history of the Third Reich’.
The drawback for Putin is that tens of 1000’s of battle-hardened Wagner troopers, who fought for – and in lots of instances stay totally loyal to – Prigozhin and Utkin, are actually scattered in theatres from Bakhmut in Ukraine to sub-Saharan Africa.
Dismissing them as mere mercenaries motivated solely by money – that’s, merely weapons for rent – can be short-sighted.
True, Prigozhin recruited tens of 1000’s of jailbirds to struggle and die for him. But when males take up arms collectively even in a rotten trigger – consider Hitler’s Waffen SS – they develop bonds of comradeship, an esprit de corps. To reduce the top off the snake, as Putin clearly hoped he would possibly, is usually solely to search out that some new and hideous hydra begins to hiss as an alternative.
In the previous, Putin’s coverage was to remove particular rivals after they started to signify a menace to him. As China’s murderous Chairman Mao remarked: ‘Kill one, frighten ten thousand.’ But murdering the leaders of a loyal armed militia is a distinct story.
Prigozhin imposed a brutal self-discipline, however his males realized not solely methods to kill and keep away from being killed, but in addition the lifesaving worth of loyalty. Putin is not going to simply break these bonds.
Since June, the Wagner Group has misplaced its tanks and artillery, handed again to the common Russian military. Its males are primarily in organised items distant from Russia in Africa, the place they’re useful guarding gold mines and different minerals.
They are actually a hazard to the individuals there, however not on to the West. In the one direct firefight between Wagner mercenaries and the US navy in Syria in February 2018, the Russians misplaced closely.
But whereas Nato forces have little to worry from one other head-on conflict with Wagner’s thugs, Putin ought to nonetheless be afraid of them. They will show onerous to regulate from Moscow, typically 1000’s of miles from the battlefront. And some violent Wagner males, fanatically loyal to their murdered leaders and prepared to serve a brand new Putin-hating patron, might shortly kind a formidable hit squad.
Already some Wagner fighters have made threatening Telegram movies warning: ‘We are getting started, get ready for us.’
Divide and rule has labored for Putin – till now. Now Russia’s most senior navy males can be questioning who’s subsequent for the chop – and that may solely result in recent chaos.
l Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford