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 announced this Wednesday by the Russian agencies of Yevgueni Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group mercenaries, could not be more abrupt.
With no official confirmation of his death yet, his name appears on the passenger list of a private plane that crashed in the Tver Oblast north of Moscow on Wednesday.
The Russian civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia assures that ten people were traveling on the plane, three of which formed the crew. They are all presumed dead. It was a statement from this body that alerted that the businessman from St. Petersburg was among the passengers.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was a man shrouded in the shadows of disinformation until he decided to come out into the open during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. He admitted to being the creator of the Wagner Group and over the months thousands of his mercenaries played a more prominent role on the battlefield.
But Prigozhin also made enemies for himself. He demanded more resources from the Russian Army and directly confronted the leadership of the Armed Forces. Last June he led an armed rebellion against the Kremlin that made Russia tremble in the midst of a war with the neighboring country.
Aborted the uprising after a pact with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with the mediation of the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin had taken a step back. He agreed to go into exile in Belarus with his men and it seemed that Wagner was going to concentrate his actions in this neighboring country and an ally of Russia and in Africa.
After months of silence, Prigozhin reappeared this Monday in a video assuring that he was in Africa, although without specifying where. “We are fighting at 50 degree temperatures to make Russia bigger on all continents. We are fighting the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and other bandits,” were his last words released publicly.
Rosaviatsia has launched an investigation into what happened, while Tver Oblast Governor Igor Rudenia claimed to take the investigation under his personal control.
The plane, an Embraer Legacy business jet, was en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg when it went down near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Bologovsky district in the northwest of the Tver region.
Journalist Ksenia Sobchak, a candidate for the Russian presidency in 2018, as well as the Baza channel of the Telegram application, published the onboard number of the downed plane, RA-01795, which belongs to Prigozhin.
