When Russian authorities announced on Wednesday that Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on board a private jet that crashed, the question wasn’t so much why he might have been killed, but why a man President Vladimir Putin had branded a traitor wasn’t taken out earlier.
Putin has not addressed the crash, but political and security experts say what appears to have happened to Prigozhin sends a strong signal — that if any of the Russian elite publicly challenges Putin, they will be taken out in a public way.
“What happened seems to confirm the general pattern of Putin’s rule,” said Sergey Radchenko,
