In a 2018 documentary, Vladimir Putin answers instantly when asked if there is anything he cannot forgive. "Betrayal," he says with no hesitation. The Wagner mercenary group chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in a probable assassination last week on board his Embraer private jet, held a similar belief. One of his fighters' tactics to punish deserters was to tape their heads to a block of concrete and then bludgeon them to death with a sledgehammer. The hammer became their symbol.
For years, Prigozhin did the Kremlin's dirty work and sought to spread Russian influence and sow discord among its enemies around the globe. Putin offered Prigozhin some praise after his death, calling him a "talented businessman" who had made a "significant contribution" to the war against Ukraine.
But Prigozhin's legacy inside Russia will come down to whether the former Putin ally will bear the mark of a traitor, a word that Putin used during the Wagner uprising in June and others hinted at last week as the first eulogies poured in.
Prigozhin said that his armed mutiny was meant to save Putin from the military he claimed were hiding truths about the conflict and embezzling money from the war effort. But Prigozhin also clearly overstepped the line, denouncing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, saying on social media that "the war wasn't for demilitarising or denazifying Ukraine. It was needed for [defence minister Sergei Shoigu to receive] an extra star."
Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia centre, wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal that from the moment Prigozhin's uprising was called treason, he was a marked man. "Describing Prigozhin as a traitor meant consequences were inevitable," he said. "Otherwise, a system built on informal principles and practices rather than formal institutions risked becoming unmanageable."
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