An ally of the owner of Wagner’s mercenary army Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russian war veteran Igor Mangushev has died. According to the Russian state-controlled agency RIA, this was announced by his friend and commander of one of the militias of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, Akim Apachev.
The Russian server MK reported on Saturday that Mangushev ended up in the hospital with a shot in the head and his chances of recovery are almost zero. “The bullet got stuck in the middle of his brain, it got far,” said Apachev, who visited Mangushev with his wife in the hospital.
The circumstances of Mangushev’s injury are not known, several analysts pointed to the strangeness surrounding the whole incident (we wrote here). For example, Mark Galeotti from the Institute of International Relations in Prague claims that rather than a war injury, the circumstances resemble an execution.
According to the RIA source, the Russian Investigative Committee took over the investigation. Apachev claims that the perpetrator is already known, but did not give any further details.
In Russia, Mangushev paid for one of the most uncompromising supporters of aggression against Ukraine. And also for one of the loudest critics of the Russian military leaders and representatives of the Kremlin, who, in his opinion, are too hesitant and their war effort is insufficient, the server wrote already in the fall Foreign Policy.
Prigozhin’s influence in Moscow is growing
He does not hesitate to openly criticize Russian army commanders and Putin’s old acquaintances. In Moscow, they are beginning to fear what Yevgeny Prigozhin will do.
At the end of last summer, he drew attention to himself when a video of his morbid performance in a Moscow club began to circulate on the Internet. He appeared on stage with a human skull in his hand. He claimedthat it belongs to the Ukrainian defender of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, whom he personally killed.
Mangushev also described himself as the author of the infamous Z symbol, which “decorates” Russian tanks and indicates support for the Russian invasion. On his Telegram account, he encouraged the killing of Ukrainian civilians.
Mangushev pays for close ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of Wagner’s mercenary army, nicknamed “Putin’s cook”. However, he was never directly part of the group. He served as a captain in the Russian army and reportedly commanded a unit that specialized in combating drones.
Mangushev participated in the conflict in Ukraine from the very beginning. Already in 2014, he fought in the Donbass as part of the private army ENOT Corp., which allegedly has ties to the Russian FSB counterintelligence, and befriended pro-Russian officials there. Subsequently, he worked as a senior employee in a St. Petersburg agency that is responsible for disinformation campaigns and tried to influence elections in a number of Western countries.
As a political strategist, he also worked with Prigozhin’s Patriot news network, which was supposed to try discredit Russian liberals, such as Lyubov Sobolova, a close associate of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
