Following the reported death of Wagner mercenary group Boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash, a memorial has been set up near the former Wagner headquarters in the Russian city of St Petersburg.
People laid flowers, lit candles and left memorabilia bearing the Wagner group’s skull logo at the memorial.
This came as Russia’s aviation agency, Rosaviatsia announced that Prigozhin was one of 10 people on board a plane that crashed while travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg.
Yevgeny was reportedly killed when the Embraer aircraft crashed on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 evening near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Tver Region.
His reported death came months after he led his Wagner troops in a mutiny against Russia’s military.
All 10 people on board of the aircraft are reportedly dead. The crew members were Captain Aleksei Levshin, Co-Pilot Rustam Karimov and Flight Attendant Kristina Raspopova.
Other passengers, apart from Prigozhin, were Sergey Propustin, Evgeniy Makaryan, Aleksandr Totmin, Nikolay Matuseev, Dmitriy Utkin, a trusted lieutenant of Prigozhin’s since the beginning of the Wagner Group, and Valeriy Chekalov.
It was said that the plane showed no sign of problems until a precipitous drop in its final 30 seconds. Ian Petchenik of Flightradar24 disclosed that the aircraft made a “sudden downward vertical” at 6:19pm local time (15:19 GMT).
Within about 30 seconds, the aircraft had plummeted more than 8,000 feet from its cruising altitude of 28,000 feet.
“Whatever happened, happened quickly,” Petchenik said.
Russia’s aviation authority disclosed that an investigation into the cause of the crash was under way but offered no preliminary theory as to what may have happened.
“Prigozhin Signed His Own Death Warrant”
According to Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Prigozhin’s death was predictable following his mutiny against Russia’s military.
“Prigozhin signed his own death warrant the moment he stopped 200km from Moscow,” Podolyak disclosed.
Podolyak said that Prigozhin’s mutiny in June and the incursion of his mercenary fighters into Russian territory “really frightened” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The uprising, predictably, led to consequences because “Putin doesn’t forgive anyone for making him afraid,”Podolyak added.
Similarly, Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA operations officer who served as the agency’s Moscow station chief, stated that he had no “doubt that it was on Putin’s orders” that Prigozhin met his reported end in a plane crash.
Hoffman said that he believed that Prigozhin was not arrested after his failed mutiny in June “to give him a kind of false sense of security, freedom of movement, so they could snipe him.”
“This is about regime security for Vladimir Putin. You cannot allow a guy you called a traitor in late June, when he launched a mutiny, to live. That’s just not going to happen.
“And Prigozhin, whose formative experience was as a hotdog salesman, probably had an inflated opinion of his staying power.”
Daniel Hoffman
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, also noted on Telegram that “no matter what caused the plane crash, everyone will see it as an act of vengeance and retribution” by the Kremlin, and “the Kremlin wouldn’t really stand in the way of that.”
“From Putin’s point of view, as well as the security forces and the military – Prigozhin’s death must be a lesson to any potential followers,” Stanovaya said.
Stanovaya opined that after the mutiny, Prigozhin “stopped being the authorities’ partner and could not, under any circumstances, get that status back.”
“He also wasn’t forgiven. Prigozhin was needed for some time after the mutiny to painlessly complete the dismantling of Wagner in Russia.”
Tatiana Stanovaya
She added, “alive, happy, full-of-strength and full-of-ideas Prigozhin was, definitely, a walking source of threats for the authorities, the embodiment of Putin’s political humiliation.”
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