It's official: The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader and financier of the Wagner mercenary group, was officially confirmed by Russian authorities days after his private plane plummeted to the ground northwest of Moscow. While the Kremlin has engaged in the usual obfuscation and denial, Prigozhin, who led a 24-hour mutiny in June that embarrassed the Russian government, was likely the victim of the Russian security services.

We may never know who specifically authorized the mercenary chief's killing. But whether it was Russian President Vladimir Putin or someone lower in the pecking order, Prigozhin was obviously viewed by the upper echelons of the Russian government as a liability that needed to be dealt with. While Prigozhin's men in Wagner were arguably the most battle-tested and ruthless in Ukraine, the former caterer-turned-warlord got too big for his breeches. You can't mouth off about Putin being deceived by his military advisers, let alone shoot down a few Russian aircraft, as you drive toward Moscow and then live to tell the tale. Russians such as journalist Anna Politkovskaya, oligarch Boris Berezovsky and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov were killed for far less.

Prigozhin will no longer be a nagging challenge for the Kremlin. But his death spurs a series of questions.

First, what will happen to the Wagner Group? This band of mercenaries has proved quite useful for Putin over the years. In Ukraine, Wagner provided the Russian military with tens of thousands of men; they were used as cannon fodder in areas such as Bakhmut. Just as important, Prigozhin bought the Russian military high command the time to train hundreds of thousands of additional recruits and allowed Putin to delay a second, unpopular mobilization. (The first, in September 2022, prompted tens of thousands of eligible Russians to flee the country.) In Africa, Wagner helped solidify Moscow's ties with several countries, including Mali, Sudan and the Central African Republic, without having to expend official Russian government resources.

All of this is now up in the air. Putin will have to make a decision. Cutting Wagner loose doesn't seem practical or plausible. For the last two months, the Kremlin has tried to distinguish the “patriots” of the organization from its leadership, which suggests that Putin wants to preserve it in some fashion. Now that Wagner's leadership has been neutralized in the most sensationalist way possible — Prigozhin wasn't the only high-profile Wagnerite to perish in the plane crash — the Russian state will try to exhibit more control over the group's operations. There is some evidence to this effect already; on the same day Prigozhin's plane went down, Russia's deputy defense minister traveled to Libya, Wagner's turf, to meet with Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar. On Friday, Putin signed a decree that requires any entity working on behalf of the Russian military to declare an oath of allegiance to the Russian state. It seems like Putin has learned his lesson: The last thing he wants is a mini-Frankenstein's monster free to do what it wants.

Zoom out further, and another question emerges: Does Prigozhin's death matter as it pertains to the ongoing war in Ukraine? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Of course it will. Prigozhin, after all, was essentially an informal general, often at the front recording videos as explosions occurred miles away. He used his high-profile stature and mad-dog antics to push the sluggish, gargantuan Russian military bureaucracy into accelerating ammunition shipments to his men.

Wagner, however, is no longer much of an actor in Ukraine. The Kremlin basically used the group as an assault force, doing the work Russia's real generals weren't particularly keen on performing themselves. Consider the Battle of Bakhmut. In what is known as a “meat grinder” tactic, scores of men were tasked with pressing forward in the face of intense Ukrainian fire. When the city was finally in Russia's hands, Prigozhin's men withdrew to occupied Ukrainian territory. They haven't really been in the action ever since. Approximately 5,000 Wagnerites are now sitting in neighboring Belarus, training the Belarusian army. The days when tens of thousands of mercenaries were at the beck and call of a charismatic warlord doing the Kremlin's bidding are likely long gone, which means Putin will have to rely on the formal enlistment and recruitment process to generate the men he needs to prosecute the war.

Finally, the dramatic last few days raise questions as to the strength and durability of the political system Putin has built over the last 23 years. Putin has preserved his system by keeping the Russian economic and political elite on his side through inducements and coercion. The fact that Prigozhin was able to lead a very public rebellion, capture the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and jet toward Moscow with only the most token resistance from Russian security forces was a huge dent to the image Putin successfully conjured over the last two decades. That he allowed Prigozhin to get away with it, dropping charges against him and permitting him to move to Belarus, added salt to the wounds.

Killing Prigozhin goes a long way toward alleviating those embarrassments. Any of the elites who may have been thinking about challenging Putin's management of the war in Ukraine will now be scared straight. It's likely no coincidence that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, one of Prigozhin's allies in the Russian military, was stripped of his title around the same time the mercenary chief met his fiery death.

Putin has made a statement: Cross me, and you will pay with your life. In other words: business as usual at the Kremlin.

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.