A comprehensive look at Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. From Katrina Vanden Heuvel at scheerpost.com:
A Russian friend texted me soon after learning that the head of Wagner private military company (PMC), Yevgeny Prigozhin, had been killed in a private plane crash, midway between Moscow and his native city of St. Petersburg. My friend had just seen the New York Post headline, “Russian dissident Prigozhin reported dead after a plane crash outside Moscow.” My friend, a longtime independent editor whose paper has published—and protected—dissidents, was apoplectic. “Dissident!?” Between May 2022 and May 2023, the Russian government paid $1 billion to Wagner for military and other services (including inflated catering prices for poorly paid soldiers). Indeed, Putin has said, “We fully funded this group.” (At the time this went to press, Prigozhin’s death had still not been officially confirmed.)
If Prigozhin was not already a household name in Russia following the attempted rebellion that The New York Times says exposed him as Putin’s “biggest threat,” he certainly was after his Embraer private jet crashed.
Prigozhin’s Wagner Group operated in several African countries, including the Central African Republic and Sudan, as well as in Syria as of 2015 and in Ukraine since 2014. It captivated governments and media across the globe and made international headlines after having declared a “March on Moscow” to remove what they decried as the incompetent and corrupt Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Following Wagner’s seizure of a regional military command, the downing of seven Russian aircraft on their way to Moscow, and Putin’s determined speech accusing the mutineers of treason and vowing punishment, the rebellion was halted in dramatic fashion. The charges leveled against Prigozhin and his supporters were dropped following a still unclear agreement ostensibly mediated by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Nevertheless, Prigozhin’s ultimately aborted armed rebellion mesmerized Western audiences who had long believed that Putin’s downfall was just around the corner.
Utkin the founder and eight other people were on the plane.
Scuttlebutt is that air force leader Surovikin, he of Armageddon and rugged defense line fame, will now lead PMC.
The plane was spiraling down in the videos and it could have been a bomb onboard but who was the bomb planter or it could’ve been a surface to air missile and why were they both on the same plane when usually they split up?
A surface to air could have come from a plane up to 200+ miles out.
He was a national hero to the Russians and they don’t care about Prigo taking money from the oligarchs that run the place because of the results at Artemivsk or Bakhmut. (h/t-JR)
“Nothin’ really matters much, it’s the doom that counts.”
Bob Dylan, Shelter From The Storm