How Putin Uses Payback Politics to Keep Russia Under His Control

livemint.com:

When Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash this week, he did little to dispel the notion that he might have had something to do with it. The Wagner chief , he said at a meeting at the Kremlin Thursday, was “a man with a complicated life story, and he made many mistakes in life." Crossing Putin might have been chief among them.

The Russian leader has a long history of striking back against his critics and rivals, and by leading an aborted mutiny earlier this year, Prigozhin appeared to have placed himself squarely in the Kremlin’s sights. Questions remain over exactly how the Embraer Legacy 600 was brought down , killing nine other people.

Initial U.S. government assessments, which officials stressed are incomplete, suggest that a bomb exploded on the aircraft or that some other form of sabotage caused the crash.

What matters most, analysts say, is how ordinary Russians and the country’s political elites view Prigozhin’s death—and what it says about the longer-term stability and predictability of the Russian state as Putin faces the growing economic cost of his invasion of Ukraine and the prospect of a morale-sapping, yearslong war. “Putin’s politics are about power and the stakes are higher…to the extent that he can lose powers in ways that are not related to the constitution," said Sam Greene, director for democratic resilience at the Washington, D.C.,-based Center for European Policy Analysis, a public-policy institution.

“He needs to project power at all times. So the sense that there are very severe consequences for challenging him is something that he works very hard to maintain." Putin on Thursday referred to Prigozhin’s importance to the war effort in