no és el primer cop que Prigozhin ’mor' en un accident d'avió
THE CHEF IS COOKED: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mutinous boss of the Wagner mercenary group and former close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is believed to have been killed in a plane crash in Russia. Prigozhin was on the flight manifest, along with nine others, including believed Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin. The POLITICO team has the latest here.
A dish best served cold: Putin seemed to hint at the incident in remarks made at an event on Wednesday night, in which he appeared cheery. “Devotion to the homeland and loyalty to the military oath is what unites all participants of the special military operation,” he said, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Who did it? Speculation is rife that the increasingly defensive and embattled Russian president ordered the downing of Prigozhin’s plane. Or should we call it a special landing operation?
Putin’s message to other would-be challengers: Traitors will be liquidated.
Timing is everything 1: The crash happened exactly two months after Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny … just two days after the warlord resurfaced in a defiant video address allegedly filmed in Africa … and only a day after Russian media announced the firing of Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine, who has not been seen in public since reports circulated that he had known about Prigozhin’s planned mutiny.
Timing is everything 2: Today is Ukraine’s Independence Day, when the country marks the day it split from the Soviet Union in 1991.
What happens now: Prigozhin’s demise raises several questions about Russia’s flailing war on Ukraine, as well as Putin’s ongoing influence in Africa and the Middle East, where Wagner has been acting as the Kremlin’s armed foreign policy wing and propping up anti-Western autocrats. It’s likely Wagner will continue its operations in Africa under a new, more loyal leader. But the decision to liquidate Prigozhin may yet have consequences, if a significant cadre of Wagnerites decide they were more loyal to their downed leader than to the man in the Kremlin.
Exhibit A: “Let this be a lesson to all. Always go all the way,” said the Rusich Group, a neo-Nazi paramilitary unit that is closely aligned with Wagner, in an ominous Telegram post.
Words from beyond the grave: The Grey Zone Telegram account, considered close to Prigozhin, published several videos of the warlord overnight. “We’re all going to hell,” he says in one, “but in hell we’ll be the best.”
Caveat — this isn’t the first time Prigozhin has ‘died’ in a plane crash: Back in October 2019, Russian media reported Prigozhin may have been among the passengers on a plane that crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, my colleague Eva Hartog writes in to report. A few days later, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti refuted the reports, citing a person close to Prigozhin as saying he had been in Russia at the time of the crash and was “very surprised, to be considered dead.”
US response: Regardless, the Biden administration shrugged off the news of Prigozhin’s apparent demise, according to my U.S. colleagues. However, when asked if he thought Putin was behind the plane crash, President Joe Biden said: “there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
24-8-23, politico