Yevgeny Prigozhin might have retired in peace someday. Or he could have been found writhing in the throes of Novichok, a nerve agent favored by Russia’s spy agencies. He might also have fallen out of a window, crashed in his car or slipped in his bathroom — like so many Russians lately and like any of us potentially.
As it happens, Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, a notorious Russian private army, appears to have died when a private plane crashed while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing him and the three pilots and six other passengers said to be on board.
That’s assuming that Prigozhin really was on board. His death has been proclaimed twice before, once in an African plane crash. Both times Prigozhin later turned up professing surprise at reports of his own demise. What’s been said about the autocratic and repressive reign of President Vladimir Putin also applies to Russia generally, including Prigozhin’s Wagner Group: "Nothing is true and everything is possible.”