Putin, Prigozhin and Western Illusions

Vladimir Putin’s foes have been turning up dead for years, and the latest is mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was reported to have died Wednesday in a plane crash outside Moscow. This is no coincidence, comrade, as the Soviets used to say.

Russia’s civil aviation authority confirmed Prigozhin was on the flight, while social-media channels said the Embraer jet was shot down by a missile. President Biden told reporters that “I don’t know for a fact what happened but I’m not surprised,” adding that “there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”

Prigozhin’s fate was probably sealed after his failed June mutiny against Mr. Putin. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group gained control of the Russian city of Rostov, marched toward Moscow and shot down Russian planes. The mercenary leader claimed that “we did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime.” But he demanded the resignation of Russia’s top defense officials “who, through their unprofessional actions, made a huge number of mistakes” in Ukraine.

That was a politically explosive accusation—and true. Mr. Putin has used his own people as cannon fodder, and the U.K.’s Defense Ministry estimates that Russians suffered as many as 200,000 casualties, including 60,000 killed, in the first year of the war.

Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Putin ally, brokered an unlikely truce to end Prigozhin’s mutiny. But the rebellion was the most significant challenge in his 23-year rule. If Prigozhin’s death was an assassination, it was intended as a message to other potential coup plotters. You can bet that is how Russians will read it.

Prigozhin’s demise reveals the brutal politics that now controls Russia. Too many in the West, including on the American left and right, imagine that Mr. Putin can be shamed or appeased into backing away from his ambitions to reconstitute a Greater Russian empire.

This underestimates his motivating ideology and ruthlessness. He will kill anyone who stands in his way at home, and he’ll do the same abroad—in Ukraine, Poland, or anywhere else, if he believes he can get away with it.