After months of confronting the Russian military leadership, accusing the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff of being unpatriotic and corrupt, or insulting them in videos posted on social networks for the whole world to see, the end that the agencies announced yesterday Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group mercenaries, could not have been more abrupt.
The Russian Civil Aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, said last night that Prigozhin was traveling in a private plane that crashed on Wednesday afternoon in Tver Oblast, north of Moscow. The agency assures that ten people were traveling on the plane, three of which formed the crew. They are all presumed dead. This organization alerted that the businessman from St. Petersburg was among the passengers, according to the list of passengers, although the charred bodies 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, so 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, nevertheless gave him up for dead. It also reported that the residents 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 the number two of the group was also traveling with Prigozhin, Dmitri Utkin, a neo-Nazi who was the first head of the Wagner Group and the person who named the group because of his admiration for the composer who was so liked by the national socialist elite.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was a man who had lived in the shadows of misinformation for years. But in the conflict with Ukraine he decided to come out into the open. 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 various fronts of the war. The best known was that of Bakhmut, a city in the Ukrainian Donbass with a population of about 70,000 people before the conflict, which has been the longest and bloodiest battle of the conflict. Russian troops managed to take control of it in May.
During this time, Prigozhin also made enemies among the Russian ranks. In the midst of the fighting with Ukraine, his messages on social networks demanding more resources from the Russian army were common, accusing the leadership of the armed forces of not giving their men ammunition or “stealing their victory.” And for all of this, he directly blames the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, a man close to Russian President Vladimir Putin for years; and the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Valery Gerasimov.
With the excuse that these two high commands had betrayed the Russian cause in Ukraine, in June he led an armed rebellion against the Kremlin that made Russia tremble in full warfare with the neighboring country. Prigozhin rose up in Rostov-on-Don. For a few hours, thousands of his men advanced on Moscow to stop Shoigu and Gerasimov.
But the uprising was aborted after a pact with Putin, in which Alexander 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 the Wagner Group was going to concentrate its 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 50 degree heat to make Russia bigger on all continents. We are fighting the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and other bandits ”, were his last words released publicly.
The plane in which Prigozhin would have made his last trip was an Embraer Legacy business jet. He was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg when he fell near the village of Kuzhenkino, in the Bologoye district, in the northwest of the Tver region. According to Russian media, it belonged to the fleet of the controversial businessman.
The shocking plane crash coincided with the latest news on Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed General Armageddon for his toughness during Russia’s intervention in Syria’s civil war. Accused by some media of having been aware of the military uprising of the Wagner Group in June, since then he had not been seen in public, which raised suspicions of a purge within the army.
That overwhelming nickname has not been enough for the Kremlin to continue trusting him at the head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, a task he had been performing since 2017. Yesterday it was learned 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 known through the official Ría Nóvosti agency, which reported that the “former head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergei Surovikin, had been relieved of his position, while General Víktor Afzálov, chief of the General Staff of Air Force, acts temporarily as commander in chief.
Surovikin also automatically ceased to be deputy commander of the Russian forces operating in Ukraine in the framework of the military campaign launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022 and to which Moscow continues to apply the euphemism of “special military operation”.
The 56-year-old Sergei Surovikin was last seen in public on June 23. A key date in the current conflict with Ukraine, since that day international attention focused on Russia, fearful that (as on other occasions) her story would once again shake the world.
That day Yevgeny Prigozhin turned against his lord and announced that he was mutinying against the army high command.
Surovikin appeared on video at night, visibly nervous, in uniform and without insignia. In it he asked Prigozhin and his men to abort the coup. Without result, because the next day they took Rostov-on-Don under their control. In an urgent message to the nation, Putin warned that the military uprising could spark a civil war.
The Wagner Group rebellion ended after negotiations with the Kremlin and an agreement for them to leave Russia and settle in the territory of its neighbor and ally Belarus. But since then, nothing concrete has been heard from Surovikin, a respected and feared military chief to whom Putin entrusted command of the military intervention in Ukraine in October 2022. He was in charge of the Russian forces in the neighboring country from October 2022 to January 2023, when that task was assumed by Gerasimov. Surovikin was second to him.
After the Wagner Group revolt, various Russian and international media outlets claimed that the Russian authorities were investigating Surovikin for possible complicity in the mutiny or, in any case, for having previously known about Prigozhin’s plans and not having prevented or denounced them.
Surovikin was the only Russian military commander that 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. The Moscow Times said that he had been arrested. Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov denied those reports, saying they were “speculation and conjecture.” Other media placed him in the Lefórtovo prison, in Moscow. And some military bloggers claimed that he and other senior officers had been questioned about his possible role in the mutiny. The general’s daughter, Veronika, came up against all these publications, who 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. For the brutality of his actions against cities like Aleppo, controlled by the opposition to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, he earned the nickname of General Armageddon.
