Prigozhin lives! Kremlin battles rumors Wagner chief faked his death

If Russia’s propaganda machine seemed caught off guard by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, its reaction to his death in a plane crash has been far more disciplined.

Take Margarita Simonyan, the normally outspoken editor-in-chief of the state broadcaster RT. As Prigozhin’s Wagner troops marched on Moscow in late June, her social media accounts were silent. Only days later, after calm had been restored, did she resurface, saying she’d been digitally detoxing while on a trip down the Volga River.

But Wednesday evening, when news broke that a plane reportedly carrying Prigozhin had plummeted to the ground, her take was swift: “Among the versions being discussed is that this is a fake,” she wrote on Telegram. “But I personally am leaning towards the more obvious.”

Across the state apparatus, the narrative is clear: The crash is likely a technical affair and Prigozhin is, indeed, dead. Nothing much to see here.

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Prigozhin — a lover of the theatrical and a Houdini-style master of trickery and deceit — offered myriad reasons to suspect a final twist in an eventful life.

After finally stepping out of the shadows as the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, his public performances became increasingly dramatic, erratic and surreal.

When he spouted insults at Russia’s top military brass, many wondered whether he was simply a paid lightning rod for tension among those disappointed in Moscow’s military achievements. And when his men recorded a video featuring what appeared to be an extrajudicial execution of a Wagner fighter who had crossed over to Ukraine with a sledgehammer, many wondered whether the whole thing had been carried as a spectacle to keep others in line.

Prigozhin’s mutiny and its murky aftermath did little to provide clarity. He was called a traitor by Putin on state television, only to be offered an exit to Belarus. And even then, he continued to be sighted in Russia, and according to Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, even had an audience in the Kremlin with Putin after he was meant to have been exiled.

Law enforcement official raiding his St. Petersburg mansion uncovered fake passports and photos of Prigozhin in a variety of wigs, adding to earlier reports he had several lookalikes on his payroll whom he took on his travels to confuse potential enemies.

Even the notion of him dying in a plane crash is not new.

In October 2019, the warlord was reported to have been on a plane that crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With no sign of life from Prigozhin himself, it was left to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti to refute the reports, citing a person close to him as saying he had been in Russia at the time of the crash, not Africa, and was “very surprised, to be considered dead.”

The only certainty when it comes to Prigozhin is that it wouldn’t be beyond him to stage his death.

“It fits his style,” Christo Grozev, a journalist with the investigative website Bellingcat, told the Popular Politics YouTube channel run by allies of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Wednesday.

Grozev wasn’t the only one to raise questions. “I understand that Russia is claiming that Prigozhin has died,” Krišjānis Kariņš, outgoing Latvia prime minister, told POLITICO on Thursday. “I’ll let the facts establish themselves … Either he has been killed or he has not been killed.”

It doesn’t help that there are still different versions as to the cause of the crash. According to some independent military analysts and the majority of those posting on Wagner-linked social media, the plane was downed by Russian air defenses; others have suggested a blast onboard is to blame.