How Putin’s Right-Hand Man Took Out Prigozhin
By Wall St. Journal, Dec. 22, 2023
On the tarmac of a Moscow airport in late August, Yevgeny Prigozhin waited on his Embraer Legacy 600 for a safety check to finish before it could take off. The mercenary army chief was headed home to St. Petersburg with nine others onboard. Through the delay, no one inside the cabin noticed the small explosive device slipped under the wing.

When the jet finally left, it climbed for about 30 minutes to 28,000 feet, before the wing blew apart, sending the aircraft spiraling to the ground. All 10 people were killed, including Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner paramilitary group.

The assassination of the warlord was two months in the making and approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally and confidant, an ex-spy named Nikolai Patrushev, according to Western intelligence officials and a former Russian intelligence officer. The role of Patrushev as the driver of the plan to kill Prigozhin hasn’t been previously reported..

The Kremlin has denied involvement in Prigozhin’s death, and Putin offered the closest thing to an official explanation for the plane’s fiery crash, suggesting a hand grenade had detonated onboard.

None of that was true.

Hours after the incident, a European involved in intelligence gathering who maintained a backchannel of communication with the Kremlin and saw news of the crash asked an official there what had happened.

“He had to be removed,” the Kremlin official responded without hesitation.

Collision course
-----------------
Patrushev had warned Putin for a long time that Moscow’s reliance on Wagner in Ukraine was giving Prigozhin too much political and military clout that was increasingly threatening the Kremlin.

With tens of thousands of troops and lucrative gold, timber and diamond operations in Africa, Prigozhin managed a multibillion-dollar empire overseas. But back in Russia and on the battlefield in Ukraine, his public confrontations with the military’s top brass over weapons and supplies had put him on a collision course with the Kremlin.

When that boiled over into an outright mutiny in late June against Russia’s military commanders—with an armed march on Moscow by some of Wagner’s 25,000 fighters and tanks—Patrushev stepped in to ward off the biggest challenge yet to Putin’s more than two-decade rule. He also saw an opportunity to eliminate Prigozhin for good.

In interviews with Western intelligence agencies, former U.S. and Russian security and intelligence officials, and former Kremlin officials, The Wall Street Journal unearthed new details about the mutiny and murder of Russia’s most powerful warlord and the previously unknown role of Patrushev in reasserting Putin’s authority over an increasingly unstable Russia.

Through the power of state-controlled media and his own persona, Putin has unsettled the West with his image as a determined adversary who rules Russia alone. In fact, he is kept in power by a vast bureaucracy that has proven durable through deepening hostilities with the West and rising domestic divisions over the botched invasion of Ukraine.

Controlling the levers of that machine is Patrushev. He has climbed to the top by interpreting Putin’s policies and carrying out his orders. Throughout Putin’s reign, he has expanded Russia’s security services and terrorized its enemies with assassinations at home and abroad. More recently his profile has grown, backing Russia’s invasion, and his son Dmitry, a former banker, has been appointed agriculture minister and is touted by some as a potential successor to Putin.

Patrushev’s handling of Prigozhin has helped Putin claim control ahead of the presidential elections next year.

Former colleagues of Patrushev describe him as a sober bureaucrat who, like Putin, spurns the media, relying on daily readouts about the world from Russia’s security services. Like Putin, he joined the spy services in the 1970s, and stuck with the service through the collapse of the Soviet Union when other officers flocked to more lucrative jobs in Russia’s nascent private sector.

Patrushev, 72, sees Russia locked in a struggle with the U.S., which he has said wants to steal Russia’s oil and minerals. He salts conspiracy theories into speeches and interviews. Earlier this year, he told Russia’s Izvestia newspaper that the U.S. is plotting to take over Russia because a massive volcanic eruption in Wyoming could soon make it uninhabitable.

His role in some of the darker chapters of Putin’s presidency underscores the often deadly consequences for anyone who falls afoul of the Kremlin.

Russian officials and Patrushev didn’t respond to requests for comment.

U.S. officials said soon after Prigozhin’s death that preliminary government assessments found the crash was the result of an assassination plot.

Rise of the spy
------------------
In photos of him and Putin, Patrushev is a figure in the background, mostly unnoticed in an unremarkable dark suit. Daily, he travels in a Russian-made Aurus limousine to his spartan office in the presidential administration complex, steps away from the Kremlin, said former Kremlin officials. His phone calls are usually encrypted.

Patrushev plunged into the world of spycraft at an early age in the Soviet city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Recruited into the KGB after earning a degree in engineering, he attended the spy service’s academy in Minsk. He soon worked in counterespionage and as an officer responsible for security in a region bordering Finland.

With Putin, he suffered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the security services while the government of President Boris Yeltsin attempted to introduce Western-style economic reforms. When Yeltsin appointed Putin in 1999 to be prime minister, Putin recommended Patrushev as his replacement to lead the new version of the KGB, the FSB.

Putin’s rise to the presidency the following year buttressed Patrushev’s authority. The men were linked by common origins and convictions that only strong security services could make Russia strong.

As head of the spy agency, Patrushev began to reinvent the organization and referred to it in an interview at the time with the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets as Russia’s “new nobility.”

It was a sensitive moment for the new president, and Patrushev showed he was ready to help. In his first year as president, Putin was threatened by revelations that he had served as an adviser to a real-estate company being investigated in Europe for money laundering. Patrushev traveled to Ukraine to take possession of damaging evidence from that country’s security service, according to audiotapes leaked from the Ukraine president’s office. Parts of the tapes were later verified by the U.S. government. Putin denied any wrongdoing, and the scandal later died down.

Patrushev soon signaled that traitors to the Kremlin would suffer. In 2006, Russia passed a law effectively legalizing extrajudicial killings of Russians abroad deemed terrorists or extremists. Months later, a former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled to London and wrote about Putin and his own work as a spy, was killed by a dose of a radioactive substance in his tea. A British judge said that Patrushev probably approved the murder.

As FSB director, Patrushev had hoped to foster cooperation with the West’s own antiterror efforts, which were then in full bloom in the U.S. after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. But Litvinenko’s poisoning, which contaminated a sushi restaurant in downtown London, began to sow questions about any cooperation. The assassination was one of the first of more mysterious killings of Russian émigrés in Europe and the Middle East that Western officials suspected were linked to Moscow..

When Russia convened an international counterterrorism conference in the city of Khabarovsk in 2007, the CIA declined to send any high-ranking officials, instead offering a lower-profile group headed by a former CIA station chief, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen. Mowatt-Larssen said Patrushev took him aside to say he was offended. “He said ‘Please take this message back to the CIA,’” Mowatt-Larssen said. “‘You aren’t taking us seriously.’”

In 2008, Putin promoted Patrushev to secretary of Russia’s national security council, a post that confers little formal power. But Patrushev’s personal gravitas, his proximity to Putin and his role as de facto head of its security services for more than two decades has made him the second most powerful person in Russia.

His new role also gave him the mandate to strengthen Russia’s ties abroad. Soon he was acting as a kind of hybrid intelligence official and diplomat, visiting some of the world’s most powerful leaders. The feverish pace of Patrushev’s travel schedule contrasted with how little was actually known about his meetings.

‘We know who our enemies are’
---------------------------
One of the few public glimpses into his activities was in 2016 when he went to clean up a mess left after the failure of a political interference operation in the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro. Russia’s military intelligence had tried to cause unrest to prevent it from joining NATO.

The operation, run from neighboring Serbia, failed, and the Russian agents were publicly exposed, causing fallout for Moscow’s allies in the region. Patrushev traveled to Serbia to reassure the government and brought the operatives home. Montenegro joined NATO a year later.

Most of his work was done in the shadows. His plane was spotted in Oman in 2020 at the same time that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was there, prompting accusations in Ukraine that the two had held a secret meeting. Both Zelensky and the Kremlin denied it.