Owen Matthews

Yevgeny Prigozhin died, as Macbeth almost said, as one that had been studied in his death. In the last three minutes of its existence, Prigozhin’s private Embraer Legacy jet climbed fast towards the sun, reaching the giddying height of 8,800 meters before parabolically returning to earth, spinning slowly in flames before hitting the ground at a speed of 768 feet per second. In what must be the least surprising story of the year, Prigozhin’s rise from violent criminal to billionaire caterer to mercenary leader to mutineer who dared mount an armed challenge to Vladimir Putin ended in a fatal, flaming fall.  Both Russian state media and the Wagner Group’s Telegram channels have proclaimed Prigozhin dead, even though there is no independent verification.

As rebel tanks trundled up the highway towards Moscow yesterday morning, Vladimir Putin labelled the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin a ‘traitor’ – and vowed to crush him. But hours later Putin capitulated, allowing Prigozhin to retire to an honourable exile in Belarus and pardoning the 25,000-strong Wagner force which had spent the day in open, armed rebellion against the Kremlin’s authority. For Putin, who had built his image as Russia’s strongman protector, the particular humiliation of allowing an armed general to cross back over the Rubicon unscathed must have stung deeply.  Of course, things could have ended far worse for Putin.

Civil war broke on Russia like a thunderstorm, replacing weeks of mounting political heat with a deluge of fire and fury. The sound of rifles and mortars echoed around Rostov-on-Don hours after mercenaries of the Wagner private military company took over the headquarters of the Russian Army’s Southern command. Wagner troops were filmed placing anti-tank mines on intersections in downtown Rostov. In Voronezh, Russian army KA-52 attack helicopters rocketed a tank park, apparently to stop the armoured vehicles falling into the hands of the rebels, as a burning oil refinery outside Rostov sent flames hundreds of feet into the air. A column of Wagner tanks on low-loaders was filmed heading up the M4 highway from Voronezh to Moscow, 420 kilometres to the north.

Some Turks voted for the devil they knew. More voted for the hero they knew. Either way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in the most fiercely contested election of his career last Sunday was a victory for fear over hope, for security over uncertainty, and of the past over the future.  Erdogan has, over the last five years, seen the economic miracle he helped create collapse into runway inflation, cronyism and gross economic mismanagement. Yet despite a litany of failures that would have demolished the career of any western European politician, it’s easy to see why over 52 per cent of Turks voted to stick with Erdogan. His opponent, the avuncular economist Kemal Kilicdaroglu, may have been the united opposition’s candidate.

Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been missing from public view since being taken ill during a Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May. If Belarus’s dictator dies or is incapacitated Vladimir Putin – his neighbour, patron and only regional ally – will have a vast, even existential, problem on his hands. It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.