It was both shocking and predictable.
Two months to the day after Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a brief armed rebellion that threatened the Kremlin's authority, the mercenary chief and some of his top lieutenants were listed aboard a plane that crashed with no survivors.
The truth of Wednesday's incident may never be widely known. But the signal — to Russian elites and to the world — was viewed by many analysts as blazingly clear in the field outside Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to show that his rule remains unshaken and that no challenge will go unpunished.
“Russia’s reputation for deceit, cruelty and violence is so widely accepted that nobody for one second thought that this was an accident,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told NBC News. “We all automatically assumed it was either a hit, or staged.”
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The Russian president once said he could never forgive betrayal. So even after Prigozhin called off his mutiny and Putin appeared to show him rare leniency with the offer of exile, most observers agreed the Wagner leader's days were numbered.
Prigozhin “was always a threat and a reminder that Putin is weak,” Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at London’s Chatham House think tank, said in an email. “It was only a question of the time and mode of Prigozhin’s elimination.”
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