Perhaps the most unexpected thing about the plane crash that reportedly killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the bombastic head of Russia’s infamous Wagner group, is that it happened a full two months after he brought Russia to what President Vladimir Putin warned at the time was the brink of civil war.
Prigozhin certainly seemed to be living on borrowed time. His bizarre revolt against Russia’s military leadership, which saw an armoured Wagner convoy proceed largely unchallenged through southern Russia until it stopped just short of Moscow, flew in the face of the twin rules for survival in Putin’s Russia. One, you don’t rock the boat. Two, you don’t challenge the tsar.
