2023-08-24 13:57:46
Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin led the Wagner mercenary army
Russia experts had described Yevgeny Prigozhin as a “walking dead” since he led a rebel march on Moscow in June.
Even CIA director Willam Burns recently made a comment in reference to the mercenary boss’s life expectancy: “If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire the person who tasted my food.”
If the destruction of the plane in which Yevgeny Prigozhin was traveling is ever proven to be a cold-blooded act of revenge on the part of the Kremlin, it will go down in history as the most incredible “special military operation”.
Many admired Prigozhin, an ex-con, chef and hot dog vendor become mercenary chief, both in the ranks of his Wagner mercenary army and elsewhere.
Many, too, will have seen the warm welcome he received from the public in Rostov-on-Don when he arrived there exactly two months ago, in the midst of his aborted one-day rebellion.
But he also had many enemies in Moscow.mainly in the high ranks of the Russian military forces whom he criticized frequently and publicly.
What could have ended up being his fatal mistake was having confronted President Putin when he launched that march on June 23.
Although he did not mention Putin by name at the time, Prigozhin angered the Kremlin by very openly criticizing the reasons given for the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
He told the Russians that they had been deceived. and that his sons were dying in the Ukrainian war due to bad leadership.
This was heresy, and Putin’s video message that day was downright virulent. He called Prigozhin’s march to Moscow a betrayal and a stab in the back.
“Ruthless”
Getty Images Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who became a British citizen, was fatally poisoned with polonium -210 in 2016.
Vladimir Putin does not forgive traitors or those who oppose him.
Former Russian intelligence agent who fled his country Alexander Litvinenko died a slow, agonizing death in a London hospital in 2006 after being poisoned by the radioactive material polonium-210.
A subsequent investigation concluded that his killers had brought the deadly substance from Russia and that it could only have come from a Russian government laboratory. Moscow denied involvement but refused to hand over the two suspects for trial.
then there was Sergei Skripal, a former agent of the Soviet KGB intelligence service who turned himself in to the UK.
In 2018, he and his daughter came close to death after Russian military intelligence agents contaminated the door handle of Skripal’s home with the Novichock nerve agent.
Dawn Sturgges, a local Wiltshire resident later came across a discarded perfume bottle containing the contaminant and died after applying it to her wrists.
EPA Sergei Skripal survived a poisoning attempt in 2018.
Inside Russia, there is a long list of people, both critics and businessmen, who have met sudden death. -in some cases “falling from windows on high floors”.
Putin’s most vocal opponent, Alexei Navalny, is now languishing in a penal colony, facing what are said to be fraud charges that were politically motivated.
Also survived an assassination attempt with the Novichock nerve agent after nearly dying on a flight over Siberia in 2020.
an exceptional case
Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin to Putin’s left, assisting him with his plate, in 2011
Prigozhin, for his part, was a totally different case, something that makes his death more controversial among Russians. This was an extremely useful man for the Kremlin and in the country he is seen as a national hero by some.
His Wagner mercenary group, founded in 2014, was created from a core group of former Russian special forces Speznaz agents and other soldiers.
He had been highly active in eastern Ukraine, repelling the Ukrainian army from the city of Bajhmut, while earning a terrifying reputation that the decrepit and misled Russian army never did.
The ranks of the group were filling up when Prigozhin himself visited Russian penal colonies to recruit thousands of convicts., including rapists and murderers. These were used as cannon fodder in western Ukraine.
Wagner had also been operating in Syria for years, but it has been in Africa that they have achieved strategic victories for the Kremlin.
They have developed a brutally effective business model which seems to be popular with undemocratic regimes.
Offering a range of “security services”, from protecting people with VIP status to influencing elections, silencing critics, they have received in return mining rights and access to gold and other precious materials in various African countries.
Money flows into Moscow and everyone gets rich, with the exception of the populations of those countries.
To the Wagner troops They have been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including the massacre of civilians in Mali and the Central African Republic.
Still, they have managed to supplant French and other Western forces from large areas of the African continent.
Just this week, Prigozhin had appeared on video believed to have been taken at the Mali base, promising an expansion of Warner activities in Africa and the “freedom” of its people.
Despite this, there are certainly some in Moscow – notably military intelligence – who saw him as a risk, a loose wheel and a possible future threat to the Putin government and the establishment around it.
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