A screenshot from a video of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin at a Russian prison, where he was offering prisoners release if they were willing to serve six months in Ukraine. (Twitter)
RIGA, Latvia — The Kremlin on Monday said a decision on the funerals of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, mercenary commander Dmitry Utkin and other members of the group rested largely with their families, after patriotic hard-liners called for Prigozhin to be buried with full military honors, in a sign of the ongoing fissures in Russia over the war in Ukraine.
Prigozhin, Utkin and others in their entourage were killed when their private jet crashed last week following what Western intelligence agencies assessed to be an onboard explosion. Russian investigators on Sunday said they had confirmed Prigozhin's death using DNA.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that no decision had been made on the funerals or whether President Vladimir Putin would attend. The swirling questions highlighted continuing divisions within Russia's elite over the war, and the risks posed by hard-line pro-war "turbo-patriots" who have demanded a harsher approach against Ukraine.
As the Kremlin weighed the dangers of potential unrest if Putin failed to give Prigozhin and Wagner their due as war "heroes," Kremlin propagandists fanned competing theories about the cause of the crash, apparently designed to tamp down suspicions in Russian society that Prigozhin's death was a targeted assassination with direct or indirect Kremlin involvement.
Most propagandists blamed Ukraine and Western intelligence agencies, while one version suggested that Wagner's "careless handling of ammunition" could be to blame.
Prigozhin, who earned billions and the nickname "Putin's chef" through lucrative government catering contracts, was the public face of Wagner's bloody, months-long assault on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which the Russians ultimately captured in late May. That led many commentators to credit him with Russia's main military triumph since the early days of the war.
Prigozhin also led a short-lived rebellion in June against Russia's military leadership, in which Wagner seized a key headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and a convoy of fighters rolled toward Moscow before being pulled back.
Since last week's plane crash, spontaneous memorials have sprung up in Russian cities paying tribute to Prigozhin, a polarizing figure whose bitter criticisms of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the Russian general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, were shared by many pro-war hard-liners and by some rank-and-file members of the military.
Many in Russia's elite view Prigozhin's death as a clear signal that Putin is moving to reassert control after the Wagner rebellion in June left him looking weak and ineffectual.
The Russian president is standing by Shoigu and Gerasimov, and has dismissed senior generals close to Prigozhin or critical of the top brass, including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who is known as "General Armageddon" for his ruthless approach in Syria and was frequently praised by Prigozhin.
But the Kremlin now faces a delicate balance in its handling of the funerals of the Wagner leaders, with Putin attempting to separate Prigozhin, whom he has condemned as a traitor, in the public mind from Wagner, which he has praised for its fight in Ukraine.
That effort, however, has met limited success, with Prigozhin being synonymous with the Wagner brand for many Russians. Pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov on Sunday called Wagner "one of the few things that the people of Russia can be proud of in this Ukrainian crisis."
Apart from Wagner, everything else was "too sluggish, with too many defeats, too many mistakes and weaknesses. And Wagner is strength and victory," Markov wrote on Telegram.
Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in Britain and an expert on Russian security issues, compared Prigozhin's coming funeral to the mafia funerals that he once attended as a researcher — an opportunity to see who shows the most grief and sends the largest wreath. But Galeotti said the funeral posed difficulties for the Kremlin after Putin's condemnation of Prigozhin as a traitor during the rebellion.
Many argued that Prigozhin — who is known to have been secretly awarded Russia's highest honor, the "Hero of Russia" medal — and Utkin would be expected to be buried with military honors given their roles in the Ukraine war, were it not for their leading role in the June rebellion.
"It is difficult because obviously, on the one hand, the turbo-patriots are expecting this," Galeotti said, referring to a military funeral. "And if the state denies it, then it once again becomes part of this whole myth of a stab in the back for the true defenders of the 'fatherland.' On the other hand, to provide it would seem in poor taste, and also a complex thing to negotiate."
Amid warnings from pro-Kremlin analysts within Russia that it was foolish and dangerous to openly snub Wagner, Galeotti said the Kremlin's line was to co-opt Wagner members as "heroes" fighting for Russia. "But I don't know if they can really co-opt Prigozhin," he said. "I think they can try to do that with Wagner and just hope that Prigozhin just fades."
"What they'll try to do is treat them separately, which also would imply two different funerals, not a Prigozhin plus Utkin [funeral] but a Prigozhin one and an Utkin one."
Others argue that any perceived snub of Prigozhin's funeral would pose a political risk, and might be perceived as evidence pointing to the Kremlin's hand in the plane crash.
Moscow-based political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov, of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said the Kremlin's best option was to take control of Prigozhin's funeral to avoid social media anger and to manage the optics of the event.
Kolesnikov said the Kremlin and Russia's Federal Security Service "are probably afraid of unrest during the funeral, so it is better to appropriate the funeral, to 'nationalize' it, so as not to give Prigozhin to informal groups, but to leave him under state control, to preserve the image of a statesman who 'stumbled' but can be forgiven."
To Putin, "all the bandits who participated in the 'special operation' [in Ukraine] and agreed to become cannon fodder are 'patriots of Russia' and 'heroes.' This means that such a complex figure as Prigozhin is also a 'patriot' and a 'hero,' especially when Prigozhin is dead and poses no threat to Putin," Kolesnikov said.
Igor Korotchenko, a hard-line pundit and defense analyst who frequently appears on state television, said on Telegram that it was "only right" that Prigozhin and Utkin be given funerals with full military honors, including an honor guard, a military salute and the performance of the national anthem.
Viktor Baranets, another hard-line Russian military analyst, warned of the risk that the funeral could turn into a "political show" unless authorities stepped in and put intense pressure on Prigozhin's family to say they wanted a quiet, closed ceremony.
"Many people really want to politicize this process," Baranets said. "You really want 2 million people to gather, to march around St. Petersburg with banners, a portrait of the hero in front, a band? That's what some scumbags dream of. They want to turn the funeral into a political show. It could happen."
Another pro-Kremlin analyst, Ilya Ananyev, said in an interview broadcast on Telegram that the funeral posed "a difficult dilemma for Vladimir Putin himself," with the Kremlin trapped by its own information policy against Prigozhin and Wagner.
This meant Prigozhin's death had cast a "shadow" on Putin, amid widely circulating suspicions in Russia that the Kremlin played a role in the plane crash, Ananyev said.
"The Kremlin will have to deal with the reputational risks of this version, which, it seems to me, are virtually impossible to recover from," he said, adding that abrupt expressions of admiration for Prigozhin by state propagandists would look "pretentious and silly."
"Putin should not ride into the general human flow of the event to bid farewell to Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his colleagues in front of the cameras," Ananyev said. "The president should say goodbye to Prigozhin quietly, alone with his family."
Ananyev said Putin needed to meet with the families of Prigozhin and other Wagner members, offering them “special attention and guarantees,” and that the Kremlin should publish photographs of these events later to dispel rumors of Putin’s involvement in the crash.
Once Prigozhin is buried, “the Kremlin can relax,” Kolesnikov said. He added that the Kremlin, by arresting Putin critic Igor Girkin last month, had put hard-line nationalists on notice that criticism of Putin and the war would not be tolerated.
"The turbo-patriots should realize after Girkin's arrest and Prigozhin's death that they are valuable only if they are loyal to Putin," he said.
Some nationalists portrayed Prigozhin and Wagner as charismatic heroes who projected Russia's more aggressive global role.
Far-right messianic nationalist Alexander Dugin, whose daughter Daria Dugina, an outspoken nationalist journalist, was killed in a Moscow car bombing last summer, said Saturday that Prigozhin's death had left a "charismatic void," calling the Wagner leader "the first vivid response to this challenge of the present."
He said a new "hero of Great Russia" was needed, referring to Russia's expansionism, and adding that "whoever comes after Prigozhin must follow him at his best, and on an even larger scale, while avoiding his mistakes."
