2024-09-20 00:08:05
The founder of the “Wagner” private military organization, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, was organized by the secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev. writes the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, referring to anonymous sources of Western intelligence services.
As the newspaper writes, Patrushev started to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin about the threat of Prigozhin’s growing influence in the summer of 2022. However, the president did not listen to him, because the “Wagner” mercenaries, as they thought in the Kremlin, were succeeding on the battlefield in Ukraine. According to the interlocutor of the publication, a former employee of Russian intelligence, the situation changed in October 2022.
At that time, Prigozhin allegedly called Putin and rudely complained about the lack of ammunition, which led to heavy losses among the mercenaries. Patrushev was in Putin’s office at the time, the WSJ source claims. Putin ignored Prigozhin’s subsequent complaints about supplies to Wagner, including public conflicts with the Russian Defense Ministry, the publication said.
In June 2023, when Prigozhin started his rebellion, Patrushev saw it as an opportunity to finally get rid of the head of “Wagner”, according to the article.
The newspaper claims that after it was possible to agree on the transfer of mercenaries to the territory of Belarus through the mediation of the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and the Russian President promised to stop the persecution of the rebels, Patrushev began to develop a plan to kill Prigozhin.
According to the publication’s sources, Putin was later shown the plans and did not object. According to the interlocutors of Western intelligence services of WSJ, on August 23, a small bomb was placed under the wing of a private Embraer-135 plane used by the founder of Wagner at Sheremetyevo Airport.
Let’s remind that half an hour after the flight, the plane crashed in Tver marz. All ten people on the plane were victims of the plane crash.