It would have been Nikolai Patrushev, one of the men closest to Vladimir Putin, who approved the elimination of Yevgeny Prigozhin. As the president's successor at the head of the FSB, the intelligence agency that he defined as “the new nobility” of Russia, and secretary of the National Security Council since 2008, Patrushev spent two months tracking the organization of the attack, which continued on August 23 Wagner's boss and nine of his men died in the sky over Moscow: the private jet on the way to St. Petersburg exploded half an hour after take-off due to a bomb placed under the wing.
The Kremlin denied any involvement (and has done so again in these hours), Putin himself claimed that the cause of the plane crash was a grenade that Prigozhin and his men were drunkenly “playing” with on board. Shortly after the incident, however, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that for the first time, a line was drawn between the attack and the Russian president. A European intelligence official with direct contacts within the Kremlin asked a member of the Moscow government what happened. “It has been removed,” came the reply.
Patrushev reportedly began planning Prigozhin's elimination after the June 23 coup attempt. However, Putin's adviser had been warning the president for some time about the “cook,” an ex-convict who started out of a hot dog stand in St. Petersburg and gained enormous influence thanks to Wagner, his private military company deployed to Africa obtained and then to Ukraine.
His African operations exploiting gold and diamond mines had led him to oversee a billion-dollar empire, but it was the war in Ukraine that put him on a collision course with the Kremlin. Prigozhin was actually sent to Donbass to support the regular army, but first he blamed this on Russian successes, then he began attacking the defense hierarchy – from Minister Sergei Shoigu to Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, who was accused of not sending weapons have enough ammunition to advance in the field – after all, he marched towards Moscow at the head of 25,000 men with armored vehicles and tanks.
That's when, according to Western and Russian intelligence officials speaking to the Wall Street Journal, 72-year-old Patrushev came into play, the man who interprets Putin's wishes and enforces his orders: He has ensured that his influence in Moscow has grown enormous, to the point that his son Dmitri was appointed Minister of Agriculture and is one of Putin's potential successors.
It was Patrushev himself who led Prigozhin's mutiny in the excited hours of the march on Moscow and, with the mediation of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, persuaded him to stop. Then, in early August, he ordered his assistant to plan their elimination, as he had already done with dozens of Kremlin enemies, starting with Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent killed in London in 2006. When Putin was there Western intelligence officials say the president had no objection to the plans shown to eliminate Prigozhin: the chef's fate had already been decided at this point.
After the disappearance of the leader and the “normalization” of Wagner, the Kremlin implemented a number of initiatives to continue the company's foreign mission in a new framework and create an expeditionary force. Russians and local elements will be involved. In the summer, some high-ranking Russian officials visited the Sahel. The composition of the delegations is interesting: military intelligence officers, generals, a manager representing an oligarch known for financing mercenary activities. The name that carries the most weight is that of Andrey Averanyov, number two in the Military Intelligence Service (GRU).