There’s no doubt that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, which has understandably dominated headlines this week, throws up a lot of questions.
As Jeremy Morris points out in his openDemocracy piece this week, the big one is how such a visibly violent demise pushes development within Russia itself. And what of the future of Prigozhin’s most noted achievement, the diffuse but permeating Wagner group of mercenaries, active in so many countries in Africa as well as Ukraine over the past year?
In the short term, much power has been hoovered up by Putin’s defence minister, that skilful and persistent survivor, Sergey Shoigu. A possible key figure as the dust settles is the defence ministry’s first deputy minister, Ruslan Tsalikov, who previously had links with Prigozhin but also “happens to figure prominently in Shoigu’s own empire”.
