2023-08-25 01:11:43
Vladimir Putin has already reacted to the death of the leader of the private military group Wagner and other high figures of the organization, in a plane crash on Wednesday. The Russian president sent a condolence message to the family of Yevgeny Prigozhin in which he said the controversial military leader, who in June led a revolt against the Kremlin, was “a talented man who made some mistakes”. Russian authorities say an investigation into the crash is ongoing.
“I met Prigozhin in the early 1990s. He was a man with a complicated path, who made serious mistakes throughout his life, but who always knew how to reach his goals, both for himself and for the common cause, as seen in recent years. months,” said the Russian president.
The Russian air transport agency, Rossaviatsia, confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on board the plane, on a flight from Moscow to St Petersburg that crashed on Wednesday night in the Tver region.
None of the seven passengers and three crew members survived.
The presumed dead also include Prigozhin’s right-hand man, Dmitri Utkin, a mysterious former Russian military intelligence officer and operational commander of the Wagner. Another name is Valéri Chekalov, whom the Russian media presents as the group’s logistics manager.
Riga Free University professor Dmitry Oreshkin comments: “This is a demonstrative action. After all, Prigozhin could have been quietly poisoned and died of a heart attack, like many past opponents of Putin or his generals. But there are several factors at play here. In the first place, it is clear that it is not enough to remove a person, it is necessary to remove the people around him, as they probably had a plan B, on how to act in case of loss of the boss and this plan was probably not useful for Vladimir Putin. Therefore, the ideal is to eliminate them all together, which, in fact, happened.”
The “Most Obvious Clue”
On social networks, accounts close to Wagner already suggested on Wednesday night that a surface-to-air missile had been fired to explain the tragedy, fueling speculation that he had been murdered.
During the 24-hour armed uprising, Vladimir Putin found it difficult to hide his anger, accusing Prigozhin of “treason”.
Although some people online suggest that the mercenary leader staged his disappearance, Margarita Simonian, the head of RT, one of the state media outlets, and a staunch supporter of Putin, does not believe this.
“Personally, I’m leaning towards the more obvious clue,” she wrote on X, the former Twitter.
During the night, some people gathered in front of Wagner’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, placing red carnations, candles, skulls and crossbones in front of the building.
Zelenskyy denies Ukrainian involvement
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, reacted with humor to the possibility of Ukrainian involvement in the death of the Wagner group summit: “When we asked for help from various countries regarding the planes, this was not what we had in mind”, he said at the press conference jointly with Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. “Of course, we have nothing to do with this situation, we all know whose fault it is,” he added.
Public enemy since June
From 23 to 24 June, Yevgeny Prigozhin led a rebellion against the Russian General Staff and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, marching on Moscow, seizing a military headquarters and shooting down Russian army planes.
The riot was abandoned after mediation by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
The agreement called for Prigozhin to go into exile in Belarus, along with any men who wished to follow him, and for all charges to be dropped, but the head of the Wagner Group continued to go to Russia and even to the Kremlin.
On Monday night, he appeared in a video in which he claimed to be in Africa to “make Russia even bigger”.
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