Events surrounding the sudden demise of, allegedly, a most cruel player in our war-torn world are the stuff of fiction.

Ten days ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the infamous leader of Wagner, the private paramilitary force of 25,000 fighters including former Russian prisoners, died in an aeroplane that crashed halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing all ten people on board.

Among the six other passengers was Wagner senior commander Dmitry Utkin, who founded Wagner in 2014. He reportedly admired Nazi Germany, hence the name.

So Wagner's top brass was wiped out and a vacuum created in the leadership of the group that has swaths of Africa in its grip. Exactly what thousands of Wagner mercenaries - considered part of Russian defence forces - are doing in Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mali is a bit of a mystery.

It seems Prigozhin, a former chef and long-time friend of Vladimir Putin, who had no military experience, was given the job of leading Russia's Africa foreign affairs policy, which consists of supporting either rebel groups or governments to enable getting a foothold into gold and other mining and business ventures.

Then Wagner, which is reportedly generously funded by the Kremlin and the gold it trades in, got involved in the Ukraine debacle and brought Prigozhin into direct conflict with Putin's military men.

Prigozhin won recent international attention for criticising Russian generals on their conduct of the Ukraine war and for staging what looked like an attempted coup in June, which he says he aborted only because the point of the generals' ineptitude had been made.

For two months he seemed to enjoy great freedom of movement. after apparently being pardoned by Putin who initially condemned the episode as a betrayal, but Prigozhin suffered from that old, dangerous enemy: hubris. He made the mistake so many other high achievers often do of believing their own PR, and he lost touch with reality. Every Trini child once knew that conceitedness was no virtue. It cost Putin's one-time friend his life.

Writing in the latest Atlantic, Anne Applebaum (my favourite Russian commentator) points out that Prigozhin was just one of a host of prominent Russians who have been exterminated in Putin's time. They include security chiefs, parliamentarians, journalists, critics and political activist Alexi Navalny, who famously survived poisoning while abroad only to return defiantly to Moscow and end up behind bars for the foreseeable future. Applebaum highlights that since Ukraine, Putin is targeting another sort of Russian - business tycoons, executives and their families are committing suicides, drowning in pools, slipping down stairs, falling out of windows and over cliffs at home and abroad. Maybe they were considered guilty of treason.

It is interesting to consider that in the US, which has become a civilian killing field - over 25,000 people murdered so far this year in gun violence - that President Trump is still alive, when he is so very detestable and dangerous.

Violence