One year after Prigozhin’s death, the Kremlin is humiliated once more

A year ago, a plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin exploded in mid-air, killing everyone on board. 
The Wagner mercenary chief’s fatal mistake came two months earlier, when he ordered his men to march on the Kremlin and thought he could get away with it.  
Although the coup failed, Russians had witnessed the unimaginable: a challenge to the authority of Vladimir Putin from one of his own henchmen.
A year on, Russians are again confronted with what, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, would have been unthinkable. In Kursk, foreign troops have entered Russia for the first time since World War II in a surprise Ukrainian offensive, causing some 133,000 people to flee.   
“There’s a general sense of confusion,” Vladimir, a Kursk resident who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons, told POLITICO. “Which can turn into panic at any moment.”
Although it is too early to say how the Kursk situation will play out, the incursion — just like Prigozhin’s coup — has punchеd a hole in the Kremlin’s promise to ordinary Russians that the war against Ukraine won’t affect them.
In both cases, reality exposed the narrative coming out of Moscow that it is in complete control as a lie.
However, the political fallout for Putin might not be as immediate as one would expect. 
We might never know to what extent Russians would have supported Prigozhin had he not cut short his rebellion last June. But his message that Russia’s military leadership was leading the country to disaster clearly had broad appeal. 
Back then, residents of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don rushed to greet Prigozhin and his men as heroes. Painfully for the Kremlin, some key propagandists and political figures remained silent as Prigozhin got closer to Moscow and the reaction from law enforcement was suspiciously late.
Over the past year, the Kremlin has taken measures to regain control.
For one, a large-scale purge of Russia’s Defense Ministry appears to be designed to appease some of the ultranationalists who shared Prigozhin’s disdain for the country’s top military brass, as well as instill new discipline and fear among those who might even think of breaking rank.
Former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was one of the main targets of Prigozhin’s frequent rants, has been moved to the Security Council. Others have been less lucky, with several top officials arrested and charged in an ongoing corruption probe.
The new defense boss is Andrei Belousov, a technocrat who, analysts say, while good at crunching numbers, lacks the background and charisma to present a political or military threat to Putin.
That gives the Russian president a tighter grip on the military, with Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, by his side.
Meanwhile, as the war has escalated, Russia’s propaganda machine has jumped at every opportunity to show that, as Putin warned when he launched his “special military operation” in February 2022, NATO wants to invade Russia, with the Kursk incursion as the ultimate proof. 
The message is that the bigger the threat, the more Russians should stand united and that those who don’t, like Prigozhin, are traitors. 
“Prigozhin made a considerable contribution in the battle against Ukrainian nationalists,” Vladimir Dzhabarov, a Russian senator, was cited as saying by Russian outlet News.ru on Friday. “But in times of conflict the head of a mercenary group does not have the right to commit such an act,” he added.
Most Russian media, however, simply ignored the anniversary of Prigozhin’s death, part of a general Kremlin effort to wipe his name from public memory.
But some Russians, it appears, have not forgotten. 
On Friday, many brought flowers and candles to his grave in St. Petersburg and to makeshift memorials across Russia.
In today’s Russia, that is tantamount to an act of defiance.
The subtext was clearest in Siberia’s Novosibirsk, where Prigozhin supporters paid tribute to the warlord at a site dedicated to the victims of Soviet-era repression.
As inappropriate as it is to compare Prigozhin, who condoned torture and extrajudicial killings, to Stalin’s victims, many of his supporters see him as someone who was killed for speaking truth to power. 
On Friday, multiple bloggers rehashed an old conspiracy theory that Prigozhin might actually still be alive. 
It is a sign that “there are still people who want to align themselves with him and believe he represents their interests,” wrote anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova. 
It also suggests that Russia’s setbacks in the war do not automatically translate into a desire for more democracy among Russians but, at least in some quarters, might feed into a yearning for more authoritarian leadership.
Meanwhile, Putin is following a familiar playbook that seems reserved for crises.
The president has stayed far from the affected border area and instead traveled to Azerbaijan.
When he finally did address the Kursk crisis six days after the initial incursion, it was to shift responsibility for restoring order onto his underlings and blame the West.
Downplaying the significance of what was happening, Putin used the word “situation” to refer to what was going on. At the same time, he played good boyar, promising to dole out an extra 15,000 rubles (€145) in compensation for those forced to flee Kursk.
Will that be enough?
“Those who used to support the war, now feel like they’ve been betrayed,” Vladimir, the Kursk resident, said. “Disappointment reigns.” 
Such feelings, however, have not tended to directly translate into criticism of the Kremlin or Putin. In fact, public appeals to Putin from Kursk residents show many still see the president as their savior, rather than the cause of their troubles. 
Yet Prigozhin’s coup showed that perceived loyalty is skin-deep. And that, when called upon to defend Putin and his system, Russians might instead react with a passive shrug. 
No matter how firm the Kremlin’s grip appears, the Prigozhin episode was “an embarrassing stain on Putin’s biography which has severely tarnished his image,” wrote political analyst Abbas Gallyamov. 
With other events grabbing their attention, Prigozhin’s actions might have faded into the background of people’s memories. 
But, Gallyamov added, “when the time comes, they’ll remember.”