Exactly two months after his militiamen’s ‘march of justice’ on Moscow, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s challenge to the Kremlin has reached its epilogue. The ex-convict turned billionaire, hero of Russia for the battles in Ukraine and then rebelled against the power of Vladimir Putin, died when the private jet on which he was traveling crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg. “Shot down by Russian flak,” according to the Telegram channel near the Wagner Gray Zone. “The head of the Wagner group, a hero of Russia and a true patriot, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, died due to the actions of Russia’s traitors. But even in Hell he will be the best! Glory to Russia!” Gray Zone reads. The military commander of the Wagner, Dmitry Utkin, lost his life with him, confirmed Rosaviatsia, the Russian Federal Agency for Air Transport.
The first international reaction came from Joe Biden, who immediately pointed his finger at the Kremlin: “I’m not surprised – said the American president -. There isn’t much of what is happening in Russia in which Putin is not behind.
But I don’t know much about it”. No doubts even from Kiev: “It is obvious that Putin forgives no one”, wrote presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak in X. He then added that “the demonstrative elimination of Prigozhin and the Wagner’s command two months after the coup attempt is Putin’s signal to the Russian elites ahead of the 2024 elections. Attention! Disloyalty equals death.”
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Emergency services reported that on board the crashed plane – an Embraer Legacy 600 – were 10 people, 7 passengers and 3 crew members. None would have survived. In a second moment the same emergency services, cited by the Ria Novosti agency, made it known that only 8 lifeless bodies had been recovered. The news fueled doubts, accompanied by Gray Zone’s announcement that another plane belonging to Prigozhin himself was flying over the region at the time, and then landed at an airport near Moscow without sustaining any damage. Therefore, the hypothesis that the head of Wagner was on this second aircraft could not be excluded. But then came the confirmation of his death.
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The plane that Prigozhin was actually on, disappeared from the radar at 18.20 local time (17.20 in Italy), crashed in the Tver region, near the village of Kuzhenkino. Gray Zone has released a video in which the jet can be seen falling vertically while dense smoke is released from the cockpit. In the blue sky we notice another puff of white smoke, which according to the same source would have been produced by the impact of one or more anti-aircraft projectiles against the aircraft. “Before the plane crashed, local residents heard two bursts of characteristic air defenses, and this is confirmed by contrails in the sky in one of the videos, as well as the words of direct eyewitnesses,” writes Gray Zone.
The latest images of Prigozhin date back to two days ago, when Gray Zone had also released a video in which the head of Wagner claimed to be in Africa, where his militiamen were “conducting reconnaissance and research activities to make Russia even greater on every continent”. Prigozhin had added that the Wagner Group was continuing to “perform its assigned tasks”. Today, however, the state agency RIA Novosti confirmed that General Serghei Surovikin was removed from the command of the Russian aerospace forces, after rumors had circulated in the last two months, never confirmed, of his torpedoing and even of an arrest for an alleged support for the attempted Wagner mutiny.
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2023-08-24 07:09:00
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