There is little doubt that Putin had Prigozhin killed — which is almost certainly the point
- While it's not confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead, or why, or how, it's not hard to figure out.
- Prigozhin publicly challenged Vladimir Putin and, not long after, his plane fell from the sky.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian warlord, has not yet been confirmed dead. Exactly what took place on his plane on August 23 remains unclear.
But everybody understands what happened.
President Vladimir Putin, of course, hasn't said a thing. He was at a state function with an almost comically villainous background, celebrating Russia's armed forces.
Around same time, Prigozhin's jet plunged abruptly from the skies not far from Moscow, ending up a flaming wreck. It was two months since his aborted mutiny against Putin's government.
The BBC's respected security correspondent Franker Gardner noted Thursday: "Vladimir Putin does not forgive traitors nor those who challenge him."
As assassinations go, blasting your most prominent opponent out of the sky is not exactly subtle. And that, almost certainly, is the point.
Prigozhin's presumed death seems to be the latest in a series of high-profile hits where the Kremlin seems to have barely bothered to disguise its work.
An obvious example is the attempt on the life of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian agent who defected to the UK.
According to UK officials, Russian agents smeared a rare nerve agent — Novichok — on Skripal's door, resulting in a severe poisoning which he miraculously survived.
Novichok is a poison developed in the Soviet Union which only Russian labs would have access to.
As the expert Russia-watcher Luke Harding wrote at the time, the choice of weapon was "a gruesome calling card" that pointed straight to Moscow.
The Russian authorities answered Britain's accusation with a clown show: the two suspects appeared on Russian TV asserting they were innocent men who were just in town to see the cathedral. Nobody believed it.
It was not hard to discern a message from the Kremlin: We did this, we know you know, and we don't care.
An older example is that of the defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, who was also killed in Britain with a hallmark poison, the radioactive substance polonium-210.
Britain (eventually) identified Russia as the culprit and demanded a trial of the accused killers, which also went nowhere.
Other attacks strongly linked to Russia have proliferated: the daylight murder of a rebel fighter in Berlin, the poisoning of opposition politician Alexey Navalny, and the death of Boris Nemtsov before him.
The impunity is the point. And the warning: if you cross Putin, do not expect to survive.