He really is dead. Today Yevgeny Prigozhin was buried in his hometown of St. Petersburg. There were conflicting reports leading up to the ceremony about where and when it would take place. It seems pretty clear that the Kremlin wanted this to be a very low-key affair with few people allowed so that no images or video showing long lines of mourners would wind up in the media.

Prigozhin’s press service said in a brief statement that the last rites for Prigozhin were held in secret Tuesday without offering details of the time and location, or providing photographs of the event — perhaps a fitting final chapter to a secretive life of disguises, clandestine security arrangements, diversions to conceal travel plans, duplicate passports and body doubles.

The cloak-and-dagger machinations around the burial underscore the Kremlin’s fears of potential unrest among hard-line, pro-war Russian nationalists, many of whom lionized the Wagner leader for his tough, blunt criticism of a war that has raised doubts about President Vladimir Putin’s leadership and often made his defense chiefs appear incompetent and untruthful about casualties and battlefield setbacks…

Prigozhin’s press service, which had dutifully promoted his profanity-laden battlefield videos during the months-long siege of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, provided no details of Tuesday’s clandestine ceremony. Instead, it issued a curt line to say those who wished to bid him farewell could visit the Porokhovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg.

But by the time that announcement was made, the cemetery was surrounded by a line of police standing almost shoulder to shoulder to prevent anyone from entering.

The fog of misinformation was so dense that a joke spread on social media calling it a “special funeral operation,” a pun on the Kremlin’s term for the war in Ukraine, “special military operation.”…

Information about the burial could not confirmed independently, because by the time it was released, hundreds of police officers and national guard troops ringed the entire cemetery and sealed it off to all but a few people. All that could be seen of the grave from a bridge over the cemetery were a large Russian flag, a Wagner flag, and the top of a wooden cross. A Times reporter saw policemen sweeping the funeral plot with a dog trained to detect explosives…

The confusion about his burial and heavy security presence at Porokhovskoye ensured that the throng of supporters expected to attend never materialized.

Here’s some video showing how many police were on hand:

Never seen so many policemen at a cemetery anymore. The Porokhovskoye Cemetery, where Yevgeny V. Prigozhin was buried earlier today, is teeming with police, riot police, and Rosgvardiya. It officially closed at 18:00 local time and no one is being allowed inside. pic.twitter.com/RINBxscVWP

— Valerie Hopkins (@VALERIEinNYT) August 29, 2023

This appears to be his grave.

Prigozhin's grave is walled off by a bigger security perimeter than the US embassy in Baghdad. pic.twitter.com/iILZbNLj3m

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) August 29, 2023

Here’s one more report from Reuters with a few additional shots.

Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in an unexplained plane crash last week, was buried quietly in a cemetery on the outskirts of St. Petersburg https://t.co/XGtu1iHPPN pic.twitter.com/eiJKQ9IeAM

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 30, 2023

Even after his murder, Putin is obviously worried about his remaining supporters.

To be clear, I think Prigozhin was a ghoul rounding up desperate criminals and sending them to die at the front lines for his own aggrandizement. That said, some of the things he said about the war in those final weeks before his March on Moscow were true, such as the fact that Putin’s attempt to demilitarize Ukraine had completely backfired. Also, his suggestions that the Russian Army was useless and was losing the war haven’t been contradicted yet. Those honest assessments probably put him on Putin’s list even before the march toward Moscow. Here’s hoping the ghost of Prigozhin continues to haunt Putin for the rest of his life.