Russian intelligence officials have been ordered “to assassinate” paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, according to Ukraine’s top military spy, in retaliation for the Wagner Group’s abortive uprising.
“The FSB was charged with a task to assassinate him,” Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian defense intelligence chief, told the War Zone. “Will they be successful in doing that? We'll see with time. So in any case, all of such potential assassination attempts will not be fast.”
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Prigozhin called off a lightning march on Moscow as his forces approached the outskirts of the capital, as Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have brokered a deal to give “security guarantees” to Prigozhin if they avoided a showdown between Wagner Group fighters and forces loyal to the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged to honor that deal, but the uprising delivered a severe blow to his prestige as the ruling power in Russia.
“It seems that Putin is not the only master in town and that he has lost what Machiavelli said is the basis of a state, which is the monopoly of force,” European Union High Representative Josep Borrell told reporters Thursday. “Putin has lost the monopoly of force, and certainly [an] unstable Russia becomes also a risk. Until now we were looking at Russia as a threat, because it was a force, and force has been used in Ukraine. Now, we have to look at Russia as a risk because of the internal instability.”
Russian officials have insisted that the government and society “consolidated” behind Putin during the Prigozhin affair.
"Trials have always made ... Russia stronger,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday. “It will be the same this time, too. Moreover, we can see that the process has already begun.”
Such glib assurances have persuaded neither Russian dissidents nor international observers, particularly given Prigozhin’s initial success in occupying a major regional military headquarters in southern Russia.
“If it were true, then Prigozhin wouldn’t have even made it as far as Rostov,” Russian historian Andrey Zubov told Meduza.
The Wagner Group uprising ended after Putin and the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB that Putin led prior to his emergence as heir apparent to outgoing Russian President Boris Yeltsin, denounced Prigozhin’s march.
“Putin […] has inherited that same gang of Bolsheviks that took power in 1917. Putin basically serves as the head of the Cheka, the Bolshevik party’s secret police, and its successor organizations, who got rid of anyone that stood in their way,” Zubov said, according to a Meduza summary of his remarks. “That’s one of the main characteristics of Putinism, says Zubov: ‘an inherited criminal system, based on the abuse of power,’ which they actively continue.”
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Budanov, while asserting that the FSB has been ordered to kill Prigozhin, struck a note of uncertainty about whether Putin can count even on the FSB following all his orders.
“It will take them some time to have the proper approaches and to reach the stage when they're ready to add a huge operation,” he said. "But once again, I'd like to underline that it's a big open question. Would they be successful in fulfilling that? Will they dare to execute that order?”