Mystery of Prigozhin’s death, solved

As you may recall, back in August a private plane carrying Wagner Group leaders Prigozhin and Utkin blew up in mid-air.

Both gentlemen were winners of Hero of Russia medals, a distinction equivalent to the Victoria Cross in Britain, but their valour proved helpless against the blast.

Since Prigozhin and Utkin had led an armed mutiny against Putin a couple of weeks earlier, ugly rumours started to spread immediately. The explosion, they were saying, was Putin’s revenge and a little reminder pour encourager les autres.

That was accusing Hitchens’s beloved leader of murder, but I am happy to report the rumours have been conclusively dispelled by Vlad himself. In yesterday’s speech, he explained, inter alia, that all the passengers on board got whacked on vodka and cocaine, and one of them pulled the safety pin out of a hand grenade. Kaboom!

If you doubt this version, you aren’t familiar with the facts of the matter. But Vlad was happy to educate you: “A search of Prigozhin’s office in Petersburg,” he said, “found five kilos of cocaine.”

What better proof do you need, you doubting Thomas you? The logical chain is unbreakable: Prigozhin had five kilos of cocaine, obviously for personal use.

Therefore, he must have had some for on-board entertainment too. Therefore, he and his friends were snorting it. Therefore, they were also drinking vodka – after all, they were known to have indulged in that beverage. Therefore, one of them simply had to see what would happen if he pulled that safety pin out.

In a phenomenon so far uninvestigated by science, the drugs must have also boosted the hand grenade’s yield. After all, the first thing the explosion did was blow the plane’s wing right off. That might have been the initial, albeit accidental, test of Russia’s new secret infantry weapon.

At this moment any averagely educated Russian, and even some supremely educated Westerners, will think of Gogol’s great play Inspector General. There, a corporal’s widow complains to the eponymous inspector that the mayor of her town had her flogged. The latter does a Putin and rejects the calumny: “She lied to you that I had had her flogged; she is lying, as God is my witness she is. She flogged herself.”

So far we haven’t heard that the 51 denizens of Groza in the Kharkov region blew themselves  up in the café where they gathered for the wake of a killed Ukrainian soldier the other day. Vlad must be saving this plausible explanation for later – after all, people drink at wakes. Obviously a few of them overindulged and decided to test the same kind of grenades that had vaporised Prigozhin’s plane. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?

The grenade story wasn’t the only revelation Putin vouchsafed to his audience. He also elucidated the true nature of the on-going war, which he had hitherto kept to himself to throw the enemy off scent.

When the Russian invasion started, the stated objective was to ‘de-nazify’ and ‘demilitarise’ the Ukraine, thereby saving her Russophone population from the genocide perpetrated by those Ukie Judaeo-Banderite Nazis. Since that noble goal couldn’t have been achieved without occupying the country and incorporating her into Russia, this was the actual intention, and everyone knew that.

But in any case, the target was specifically the Ukraine, that Nazi Germany in disguise. However, now Vlad has revealed that stopping the genocide of every Ukrainian Russian speaker (such as many members of the country’s government, including Zelensky) was only an intermediate objective.

The scale of the challenge Russia is facing is infinitely wider, so wide in fact that it can never be solved by blowing up a few civilians here and there, even though they tend to do it themselves. The conflict isn’t local but global, with Russia forced to defend her very civilisation with its culture, traditions and territorial integrity.

Most countries in the world have joined forces to stamp out Russia’s peerless spirituality, but those Western Nazis are in for an unpleasant surprise. Vlad was happy to announce that the Sarmat 2 ICBM, affectionally known as ‘Satan’, is ready to go.

The Satan carries ten 750-kiloton MIRV warheads, each capable of defending a good chunk of Russian civilisation against any enemy within an 11,000-mile range. It goes without saying that, when London, Paris and New York sprout those thermonuclear mushrooms, it will be their own doing – that collective corporal’s widow is already soaking the rods to flog herself.

I’ll leave you to arrive at your own evaluation of a population largely accepting such drivel at face value. I am more concerned with Putin’s agents, witting or unwitting, recruits or volunteers, who spread Kremlin propaganda to weaken the Ukraine’s support in the West.

Their tireless efforts are bearing fruit: it is indeed palpably weakening. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary have already either stopped aid or reduced it to a trickle. France and Germany aren’t far behind, if opinion polls are anything to go by. And the emergency budget passed by US Congress provides no support for the Ukraine whatsoever.

Putin’s Western shills use time-proven techniques I have to appreciate as a former adman. They know that any nonsense repeated endlessly will have a desired effect sooner or later.

Most people don’t read newspaper articles word for word, and very few ever try to analyse them rationally. Like consumers who eventually get to believe that some brand of toothpaste will make them sexually irresistible, they respond to a few buzz words being hammered into their minds by expert propagandists.

The buzz words of Putin’s anti-Ukraine shills are ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’. Peter Hitchens, for example, hardly ever mentions Ukraine without those two attachments. This, for example, is from his article last Sunday:

“Bad things about Ukraine – its corruption, its oligarchs, its thuggish factions of Nazi sympathisers, its increasingly feeble democracy and flickering freedom of speech – are simply ignored or suppressed.”

Ergo, runs his implicit – often explicit – conclusion, we have no business helping the Ukraine as she is being bled white by Russian invaders, inspired by their regime which is “hardly not the most conservative and Christian in Europe.”

It doesn’t matter that only between one and three per cent of Ukrainians ever vote for Nazi-like parties, as opposed to 20-25 per cent in Russia – or some 75 percent if we legitimately class Putin’s party as Nazi.

It doesn’t matter that the Ukraine’s democracy isn’t at all feeble – it regularly has open and honest elections, something Russia hasn’t had in at least 30 years.

It doesn’t matter that, unlike the Ukrainian government, Putin’s gang has stamped out free speech altogether.

It doesn’t matter that corruption in Russia puts her way above the Ukraine in every international ranking, and into the territory she shares with particularly nasty African regimes.

Especially, it doesn’t matter that, unlike Russia, the Ukraine has no imperial ambitions forcing her to pounce on her neighbours like a rabid dog. For a propagandist none of this matters. He aims to elicit a Pavlovian response from his audience, not Aristotelean ratiocination.

Disgorge every possible permutation of the words ‘Ukraine’, ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’ in every available medium every chance you get, and hey presto – people will start wondering why we should take any part in defending such an awful regime. QED.

“A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”, and what we do know about that country, courtesy of Putin’s Lord Haw-Haws, is that it’s “corrupt” and “Nazi”. That makes an outcome similar to that precipitated by the quotation above exceedingly likely. And for all the similar reasons.