After months of confronting the Russian military leadership, accusing the Minister of Defense in person and the Chief of the General Staff of being unpatriotic and corrupt, or insulting them in videos broadcast on social networks for everyone to see, the end that announced yesterday the Russian agencies of Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, could not be more abrupt.
Russia’s Civil Aviation Agency, Rosaviatsia, said last night that Prigozhin was on a private plane that crashed in Tver Oblast, north of Moscow, on Wednesday afternoon. The agency assures that ten people were traveling on the plane, three of whom were the crew. All are presumed dead. This body warned that among the passengers was the businessman from Saint Petersburg, according to the list of passengers, although the corpses, charred, have not been identified.
Russian emergency teams had rescued only eight bodies last night. But they could not confirm his identity. According to local media, the bodies are completely charred, meaning that we will have to wait for the DNA verdict to confirm who they are.
The Telegram channel Gray Zone, which the Wagner Group uses officially, gave him up for dead, however. It also reported that the neighbors of the accident site heard two impacts and saw two columns of steam before the collision of the device. Information that would point to the hypothesis of an accident caused.
Other Russian media also indicated that traveling with Prigozhin was the mercenary group’s number two, Dmitri Utkin, a notorious neo-Nazi who was Wagner’s first boss and the person who named the group after his admiration for the composer who so liked the National Socialist elite.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was a man who for years has lived surrounded by the shadows of misinformation. But in the conflict with Ukraine he decided to come to light. In September 2022 he admitted to being the creator of the Wagner Group and over the months his thousands of mercenaries, largely recruited from Russian prisons, played a leading role on the battlefield.
This army, registered as a private military company, served as the battering ram of the Russian offensive on several fronts of the war. The best known was that of Bakhmut, a city in the Ukrainian Donbass with a population of around 70,000 people before the conflict, which has been the longest and bloodiest battle of the conflict. Russian troops took control of it in May.
During this time Prigojin also made enemies among the Russian ranks. In the midst of the fighting with Ukraine, his messages on his social networks were common in which he demanded more resources from the Russian army and accused the leadership of the armed forces of not giving their men ammunition or of “stealing their victory” . And all of this was directly blamed on the Minister of Defense, Serguei Xoigu, a man very close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for years; and to the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Valery Gerassimov.
With the excuse that these two high-ranking leaders had betrayed the Russian cause in Ukraine, in June he led an armed rebellion against the Kremlin that shook Russia in the middle of a war with the neighboring country. Prigozhin rose in Rostov-on-Don. For a few hours, thousands of his men advanced towards Moscow to arrest Shoigu and Gerassimov.
But the uprising was stopped after a pact with Putin, in which Aleksandr Lukashenko, leader of Belarus, mediated. Prigozhin had to take a step back and agreed to go into exile in that ex-Soviet country with his men. It seemed that Wagner would concentrate his actions in this neighboring country and ally of Russia and in Africa.
After months of silence, Prigozhin reappeared in a video on Monday assuring that he was in Africa, although without specifying where. “We are fighting in 50 degree temperatures to make Russia bigger on all continents. We are fighting the Islamic State, Al-Qaida and other bandits”, were his last public words.
The plane on which Prigozhin would have made his last trip was an Embraer Legacy business jet. It was traveling from Moscow to Saint Petersburg when it crashed near the village of Kujénkino, Bologoie District, northwest of Tver Region. According to Russian media, it belonged to the fleet of the controversial businessman.
The shocking air crash coincided with the latest news about Sergei Surovikin, who is known as General Armageddon for his harshness during Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war. Accused by some media of having been aware of the military uprising of the Wagners in June, he had not been seen in public since then, which led to suspicions of a purge in the army.
With this striking nickname, it was not enough for the Kremlin to continue to trust him at the head of Russia’s aerospace forces, a task he held since 2017. Yesterday it became known that Moscow has appointed his replacement at the head of this branch of the army
Surovikin has not been publicly fired. The new appointment was made public through the official news agency RIA Nóvosti, which reported that the “former head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergey Surovikin, had been relieved of his post, while General Viktor Afzalov, head of the General Staff of the air forces, acts temporarily as commander-in-chief”.
Surovikin also automatically ceased to be deputy commander of Russian forces operating in Ukraine as part of the military campaign ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022 and to which Moscow continues to apply the euphemism of “military operation special”.
The last time 56-year-old Sergey Surovikin was seen in public was on June 23. A key date in the current conflict with Ukraine, since on that day international attention was focused on Russia, fearing that (as at other times) its history would once again shake the world.
That day Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled against his master and announced that he was mutinying against the high command of the army.
Surovikin appeared in a video at night, visibly nervous, in uniform and without insignia. You could see how he asked Prigozhin and his men to abort the coup. Without result, because the next day they took under their control Rostov-on-Don. In an urgent message to the nation, Putin warned that the military uprising could lead to civil war.
The Wagner rebellion ended after negotiations with the Kremlin and an agreement for them to leave Russia and settle in the territory of their neighbor and ally Belarus. But since then, nothing concrete has been known about Surovikin, a respected and feared military leader who in October 2022 was entrusted by Putin with command of the military intervention in Ukraine. He was in charge of the Russian forces in the neighboring country from October 2022 to January 2023, when that task was taken over by Gerassimov. Surovikin came in as his second.
After the revolt of the Wagners, various Russian and international media ensured that the Russian authorities were investigating Surovikin for possible complicity in the mutiny or, in any case, for having previously known Prigozhin’s plans and not having prevented or denounced them.
Surovikin was the only Russian military commander in whom Prigozhin, at odds with the military leadership for months, had publicly said he trusted.
The New York Times published that the general was aware of the coup attempt. The Moscow Times said he had been arrested. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, denied these reports saying they were “speculations and conjectures”. Other media placed him in Lefórtovo prison in Moscow. And some military bloggers claimed that both he and other senior officers had been questioned about their possible role in the mutiny.
The general’s daughter, Veronika, stepped out of all those publications and denied them on the Baza Telegram channel.
Surovikin led, with the exception of a few months, the Russian military contingent in Syria between 2017 and 2019, for which Russian President Vladimir Putin personally awarded him the Hero of Russia award. Due to the brutality of his actions against cities like Aleppo, controlled by the opposition to the Syrian leader, Baixar al-Assad, he earned the nickname of General Armageddon.
