Wagner chief reportedly died but has Putin cooked his own goose

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about the plane crash that reportedly killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the bombastic head of Russia’s infamous Wagner group, is that it happened a full two months after he brought Russia to what President Vladimir Putin warned at the time was the brink of civil war.   

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Prigozhin certainly seemed to be living on borrowed time. His bizarre revolt against Russia’s military leadership, which saw an armoured Wagner convoy proceed largely unchallenged through southern Russia until it stopped just short of Moscow, flew in the face of the twin rules for survival in Putin’s Russia. One, you don’t rock the boat. Two, you don’t challenge the tsar.     

But the popular assumption that Prigozhin would swiftly be eliminated – which shifted to surprise when he wasn’t – tells us much about the current weakness and fragility that surrounds Russian politics. In fact, Prigozhin's apparent elimination is likely to exacerbate that weakness rather than lead to a magical reassertion of Putin's authority.

First, it shows Russian elites they can't trust anything their president says. That's a significant departure from the Kremlin's previous modus operandi, whereby those in positions of power and influence were protected by Putin. They could count on him as long as they played by his rules.