By Zeenia Satti and Raja Shahzeb Khan
Two months after a failed mutiny and days after he issued video extolling glory to homeland Russia and military support to brave Africans trying to free themselves of continued exploitation by former imperial powers and their alleged protégé terror groups, Yevgeny Prigozhin along with six Wagner men and three crew members is killed in a plane crash while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg. West is calling Putin Prigozhin’s murderer. Putin has called for investigation of the plane crash.
In the early 1900s, Europe was a hostile place. Great powers were forming alliances against each other while maintaining military readiness. The area of greatest instability was in the Balkans, where a number of small and independent countries in Eastern Europe were situated. It was wedged between the powers of Austria, Russia, and Turkey. Austria had been occupying Bosnia for decades but formerly annexed it in 1908, causing consternation in neighboring Serbia the same way India’s formal annexation of Kashmir in 2019 caused consternation in Pakistan. Relations between Serbia and Austria remained adverse over territorial dispute. Then, in July 1914, the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist group, the Black Hand, while he was touring Sarajevo. This was the spark that ignited the international tensions spanning the continent, resulting in the First World War which ultimately led to the collapse of all absolute monarchies in Europe, the Kaiser of Germany, the Tsar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Hungary.
Prigozhin’s death and the circumstances surrounding it are reminiscent of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Days before prigozhin was killed, he pitched himself as a threat to the post-imperial interests of European powers. What if the investigation in Russia finds evidence of Nato involvement in Prigozhin’s assassination? It would mean an act of Nato aggression on Russian territory, which would pave grounds for direct war between Russia and its allies and Nato.
If Russia finds no evidence of external involvement, Prigozhin’s assassination would be inevitably interpreted as an act masterminded by Putin and executed by his military commanders, in particular Shoigu and Gerasimov. That could ignite an internal rebellion in Russia because Prigozhin was a great mobilizer and has a following inside Russia as exhibited through his easy sweep over Rostov in June. If the rebellion is serious enough (large numbers involved including men from the military) it would have a negative impact on Putin’s rule and Russia’s war with Ukraine. Russia’s current circumstances would compel it to seek the end of internal rebellion through taking military action beyond Russia’s borders. Rather than getting out of Ukraine in the style of US evacuation from Vietnam, Russia would intensify blitz and raise the stakes further. Seeing a high number of Ukrainians including civilians being killed, NATO would escalate its supplies to higher levels. That would inevitably lead to Russian military having to take action against supply lines, i.e., NATO bases in the Baltics, a whole pan from up north to south in Romania. War in Europe would mean Third World War due to North America’s involvement.
NATO and Putin both have incentive to pin the blame for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s assasination on each other. Prigozhin’s death, be it an act of political assassination or military retaliation, can yield consequences that could lead to escalation in military terms, just as the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did. And even though Prigozhin is not as high-ranking a leader as Archduke Ferdinand was, some historians note that Ferdinand’s killing was not really a 9-11 moment for Austria-Hungary. He was not a very beloved figure in the empire and his death was less a cause for deep mourning than an excuse for belligerent statesmen to pursue their aims of creating breakthrough in preexisting tensions. Prigozhin is the opposite of Ferdinand. He is not a high ranking political figure but is none the less a charismatic figure in Russia and an influential figure abroad. Just before his demise, he show cased two high profile events that proved his support base in Russia and his influence in Africa’s SAHEL. The potential for big power exploitation of Prigozhin’s death for political-military gain is there in current circumstances in the Baltics, though it may take longer to materialize. What makes today’s world different from the one in 1914 is that threats were larger in scale but fewer in number back then, which is why a straightforward world war was triggered in Europe. The innumerable threats of today, hybrid war, cyber war, info war, trade war, nuclear war, all feed into the potential for an all out war between big powers, making a global military demonstration a plausible event.
Should that happen, it would be the beginning of the end of the era in which the Euro-American powers called the West dominated the globe. History will describe the Ukraine War as the defining moment of this change.
Zeenia Satti 