Putin gets his man Prigozhin
Prigozhin’s plane has crashed, apparently killing everyone onboard:
Prigozhin, an ex-convict turned billionaire, was to leave for Belarus as part of an amnesty deal offered by President Vladimir Putin to him and his mercenary force.
While thousands of his armed fighters arrived in Belarus, Prigozhin did not leave Russia — raising questions about President Putin’s real intentions regarding his former confidant.
Prigozhin’s private jet, en route to St. Petersburg, reportedly crashed some hundred miles north of Moscow. “The Embraer business jet crashed in the Tver Region near the settlement of Kuzhenkino. According to preliminary data, all 10 people on board the plane have died,” Russian state news agency TASS reported Wednesday.
The obvious explanation is that Putin ordered it. But the entire Prigozhin/Putin story for the last couple of months has been so Byzantine that some people think Prigozhin is still alive and this is some sort of fake. I go with the first theory, but I freely admit one cannot be certain.
My alternative theory is that one of the generals he was feuding with is the one who ordered his assassination. But I also see Putin as a very likely possibility.
Juan Browne’s commentary on the loss of the Wagner Group’s Embraer is posted on his Blancolirio channel; it’s only 5 minutes long but covers the history of accidents involving this specific model of business jet as well as a video of the plane’s loss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdihkVN44E&ab_channel=blancolirio
FWIW, according to the Wikipedia article on the Embraer Legacy 600, the company stated that the Wagner Group’s aircraft had not been serviced since 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_Legacy_600
Good point, PA+Cat. While it is a little too suspiciously coincidental it can’t be ruled out it was actually an accident. Though would not bet my life savings on it …
OFF TOPIC: I see that the Biden terrorists DOJ is suing Musk for not hiring illegals and asylum seekers because of some govt reg. Of course if he had hired them then there is probably another govt reg that says he is breaking that one. Govt going after one of the few things in this country that is going right. What a mess.
This is as much an accident as Epstein was a suicide.
“The obvious explanation is that Putin ordered it.”
“people almost always see what they want to see… Or perhaps they see what they already thought.”
It is of course a possibility that Putin ordered it. If so, it would be in response to Prigozhin’s failure to follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum; ”When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
Which especially applies to ‘strong men’.
why they hadn’t tried such a thing since the 1770s, with pugachev
Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was a Russian oligarch and leader of the Wagner private military company. He was a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin until he launched a rebellion in June 2023. Prigozhin was sometimes referred to as “Putin’s chef” because he owned restaurants and catering businesses that provided services to the Kremlin. Once a convict in the Soviet Union, Prigozhin controlled a network of influential companies whose operations, according to a 2022 investigation, were “tightly integrated with Russia’s Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU”.
Prigozhin openly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for corruption and mishandling the war against Ukraine. Eventually, he said the reasons they gave for invading were lies. On 23 June 2023, he launched a rebellion against the Russian military leadership. Wagner forces captured Rostov-on-Don and advanced toward Moscow. The rebellion was called off the following day, and Prigozhin had his criminal charges dropped after agreeing to relocate his forces to Belarus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
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Pace Geoffrey Britain, what I’m not seeing is how this man and his rebellion make any sense in the context of Putin and the Russian state.
Maybe Putin himself didn’t have that jet shot down, but why in the world would Prigozhin behave as if his life were back to normal.
Why wasn’t he running to the tall corn for cover?
In some countries a governmental agency would already be on the scene collecting and analyzing the wreckage and debris. An agency subject to independent oversight (except when UFOs are involved?). And such an analysis could determine if the damage was consistent with damage caused by a high explosive blast/fragmentation warhead or ‘the wings just fell off?’ Happens all the time.
Such a country isn’t the Russian Federation.
Per https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-24-2023
Putin nailed 3 Wagner Group leaders when he had that aircraft downed:
“The Wagner Group will likely no longer exist as a quasi-independent parallel military structure following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin, and reported Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov on August 23.”
Or…… Prigozhin has been dead for weeks. No announcement of his death was made as the Putin crowd was waiting for the inevitable “clean” deadly accident to occur where they could say Prigozhin was involved and” sadly, he did not survive the collision/crash/fall [chose one].
If the current #1 theory (Putin did the guy) holds, then we have solid, but not surprising, evidence that ten deaths as collateral damage is just how it has to go sometimes here at the Russian Federation, So sad for them.
I could be wrong, it has happened before.
“OFF TOPIC: I see that the Biden terrorists DOJ is suing Musk for not hiring illegals and asylum seekers because of some govt reg. Of course if he had hired them then there is probably another govt reg that says he is breaking that one. Govt going after one of the few things in this country that is going right. What a mess.”
It isn’t a regulation, but a law, that you can’t hire non citizens without a Green Card. An asylum seeker is someone who has applied for asylum, but hasn’t received it yet. So probably not legal to hire most of them.
That said, I don’t think that the right hand knows what the left one is doing. NASA and the military are absolutely dependent on Musk and this company, SpaceX, to get their satellites into orbit. They appear to have some priority. That may end, and the US Govt May end up standing in line, like everyone else. They are also a cowinner (with, I believe Boeing) of a NASA heavy launch contract. The other company is falling behind.
PA+Cat:
We don’t really know that the aircraft was not serviced. We know that there is no record of it being serviced, which could mean that the people who serviced it were not licensed by Embraer to do so, and/or didn’t make note of the servicing, presumably because of sanctions that have been imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
I remain suspicious about Prigozhin’s death. It would not be beyond him to buy a ticket on that flight and put a bomb on it to bring it down so he can disappear. The latest reporting I have seen out of Russia is that 8 bodies were recovered, not the 10 who were supposedly on board.
F: I was not trying to argue that the aircraft was not serviced, only report what the company said about it. FWIW, I agree with Juan Browne that it’s impossible to know exactly what happened to the Embraer, given that the crash/shootdown/internal bomb/whatever took place in Russia.
Prigozhin probably figured out that he should avoid tall buildings, and this being the case, Putin had to figure out another way of eliminating his rival.
Taking down his plane also produced a bonus for Putin; it appears that the top brass of Prigozhin’s mercenary army were all on that plane with him.
It appears that Putin hit a grand slam home run in this instance.
Prigozhin probably figured out that he should avoid tall buildings, and this being the case, Putin had to figure out another way of eliminating his rival.
Taking down his plane also produced a bonus for Putin; it appears that the top brass of Prigozhin’s mercenary army were all on that plane with him.
It appears that Putin hit a grand slam home run in this instance.
The one thing we can be sure of is that this wasn’t an accident. At this point, the United States being responsible is just as plausible an explanation as the obvious Putin.
Ira noted: “Putin nailed 3 Wagner Group leaders when he had that aircraft downed.”
We don’t really know, but, yes, it certainly feels like it was Putin, and was a devastating strike against the Wagoner group leadership. Knowing the situation in Russia, why were they all flying in the same plane is beyond me.
I was flying once from Kigali, Rwanda back to Bujumbura, Burundi after an African Great Lakes peace conference, in a small 6-seater aircraft, when I noticed that made me very nervous. I was in the front of the plane chatting the Burundian Ambo to the US when I really noticed the other passengers. Besides the Ambo, there was the Burundian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Defense, and the Vice President. I recalled the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents that was shot down by who-we-still-aren’t-sure, which triggered the Rwandan genocide.
I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs until I was safely back in a USG armored vehicle. It would have a perfect kill shot against the Burundian gov’t, and here I was sitting with them. So I ask, WTH were the Wagoner folks thinking by getting on that plane together?
An interesting aside in the above account is “Prigozhin did not leave Russia” ie never even took up the supposed “amnesty” in Belarus.
Was he so naive as to trust Vlad? In any case I go along with PA+Cat/Juan Browne that we’ll never really know. It’s already like the Kennedy assassination, the pie chart of probabilities looks like a bunch of crumbs. Though hard to argue Putin’s hand wasn’t in there somewhere.
fertcarden:
Comedy gold or consider you don’t understand “plausible”:
Didn’t Putin hire this mercenary to work for him? The mercenary turned around and attacked the man that hired him; is this not true?
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
On a side note, I always understood that there were mercenary organizations, but I thought they were small, composed of highly trained soldiers, capable of doing things like hostage extractions and such. I had no idea that there were mercenary organizations capable of fielding 100k+ personnel.
Say what you will about Prigozhin, he made his move, and Putin responded in kind.
Erronius
Prigozhin was to Putin as Ernst Rohm was to Hitler.
When the top tyrant feels any sort of threat from an adversary, someone will wind up dead.
Putin did not bother with a show trial to kill his adversary. Why bother if the outcome was preordained.
Here in the USA, we still are in the show trial phase, but if the dems stay in power, you can expect this charade will pass.
The US had no reason to off Prighozian, unless you’re one of those people who believes his mutiny was a US plot.
As for the size of Wagner – the organization was effectively a semi-deniable arm of the Russian government, and it’s size makes sense based on that. If you were a Russian vet, you didn’t join Blackwater or a similar outfit. You joined Wagner. Wagner had ready access to the prisons to fill it’s ranks. It even has its own brand-name consumer goods, which are apparently at least somewhat popular among Russian citizens.