2023-08-24 12:54:26
PMC Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin emerged on the media landscape with a video message on Monday. The video, apparently shot in a desert area in Africa, shows him in camouflage, armed and surrounded by armed people and vehicles.
“The temperature is +50, everything we love. PMC Wagner leads RPD [operazioni di ricognizione e ricerca]. It makes Russia even bigger on all continents and Africa even freer. Justice and happiness for African peoples,” Prigozhin says in the video.
However, on the evening of August 23, an Embraer ERJ-135BJ Legacy 600 corporate jet crashed in the Tver region near the village of Kuzhenkino. The plane was making a flight from the Russian capital, Moscow, to St. Petersburg, but the crash had tragic consequences. All ten people on board, including such prominent passengers as Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, founder of the Wagner Group, died in the crash.
The accident was allegedly recorded by eyewitnesses and footage shared on social media shows the plane making erratic maneuvers before crashing, generating a thick column of gray smoke. The tragedy has sparked great emotion and speculation about its cause.
Among the casualties were three pilots and seven crew members. The Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) has released the list of passengers on board, revealing well-known names such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, Dmitry Utkin and others.
The Russian authorities are investigating the circumstances that led to the accident, but there are already divergent rumors and theories. While some argue that the accident could have been caused by a technical or mechanical error, others put forward the hypothesis of external involvement, i.e. a bomb on board. The appearance of rumors on Ukrainian Telegram channels suggesting Ukrainian involvement in the incident added further fuel to the discussion.
The event also generated political reactions. Some Ukrainian channels and media appear to celebrate the passing of Prigozhin and Wagner’s top management, while others raise questions about the geopolitical interest behind the incident.
“Putin’s Revenge”. Today British newspapers came out with exactly the same front page headlines, following a single script.
Amid speculation, political scientist Yevgeny Mikhailov expresses a Ukrainian view of the incident. He suspects that Prigozhin may have been deliberately eliminated, possibly by Ukrainian intelligence agencies, given geopolitical tensions and rivalries. In this regard, he has a significant weight that we are in the vicinity of the independence day for Ukraine and a year ago the democratic Ukrainian authority celebrated with the elimination of the journalist and philosopher Daria Dugina. Of course, it is also plausible that international actors with an interest in Africa were responsible for the accident.
The tragic deaths of Prigozhin and the other passengers on the plane remain the focus of media and political attention, prompting questions about what may have caused this tragedy and its implications. As the investigation continues, Russia and the world are watching closely the unfolding developments. The most plausible version of what happened I think is this 8shared by most of the more honest and reasonable commentators):
“If we assume the plane didn’t crash accidentally, who would have had an interest in beheading Wagner’s entire top management? We need to look for someone to take advantage of Prigozhin’s murder. And that someone is certainly not Putin, for whom Prigozhin did not represent any danger, the latter having lost the attempted mutiny and not having obtained any response to his requests to replace the heads of the Ministry of Defence. Wagner in Belarus and in Africa not only no longer gave any trouble, but rather continued to offer a valuable contribution to Russian interests especially in Africa where she has been operating successfully for years. If Putin had wanted to eliminate Prigozhin, as Western media claim, he certainly would not have crashed a plane while the BRICS summit was in progress, he would not have done it in Russia but in Africa, where Prigozhin was up until the day before. And Africa is central to this story. The West is losing control of the continent and beheading Wagner’s command would serve, in its intentions, to weaken Russia in Africa and cast suspicion on Putin (the Western media indicate him as the principal) to create political instability within the Russia. If the West thought of weakening Russia in the Ukraine it is now clear that it made a mistake in its calculations and is now embroiled in a war of attrition which has achieved opposite effects to those desired, even if the destruction of the European economy can be ‘ consider an objective achieved by the USA. In summary, the instigators of the murder of Wagner’s top management must be sought among those who consider it an enemy”. @LauraRuHK
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