Prigozhin’s bid for death or glory

Up until this point, it was possible to believe that Putin was tolerating, or even orchestrating Yevgeny Prigozhin’s increasingly outspoken attacks on the military leadership and ‘the elites’ in Moscow. Vladimir Putin himself didn’t seem especially pleased with his generals. Only a few days ago, he turned his back on his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, at a ceremony to give medals to injured soldiers. The fact that this was broadcast on state television makes it all the more likely that this was a deliberate, icy snub. Putin is said to like to pit his subordinates against one another, the better to stop an obvious successor from emerging. But Prigozhin’s attacks on the military leadership have slowly but steadily turned into attacks on Putin as well.

Prigozhin was once a petty thief and served time in jail. He then reinvented himself as the Kremlin’s caterer of choice – ‘Putin’s chef’– and then again as the man running perhaps the world’s most notorious mercenary force, the Wagner Group.