Residents of the village of Kuzhenkino in western Russia on Wednesday captured footage of Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane falling almost vertically before hitting the ground. The fuselage left a trail of smoke. The plane took off from Moscow to St. Petersburg with ten people on board, including Prigozhin. At 18:19 local time something happened to the plane. For 32 seconds it rose and fell violently, as if performing evasive maneuvers. Then it disappeared from the radar.
“I want to offer my sincere condolences to the families of all the victims, it’s always a tragedy,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Prigozhin’s entourage has blamed for the death of their leader, said Thursday. “I’ve known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the early 1990s,” added Putin, who described him as a “talented businessman.”
“He was a man with a difficult fate, he made serious mistakes in life and he achieved the results he needed both for himself and for my asking about it – for a common cause, as in the last few months,” added added the Russian President. . The plane crash came two months after Prigozhin led a brief Wagner mutiny against the Kremlin, in which he sent columns of armored vehicles toward Moscow before ending the uprising. This was the greatest threat Putin has faced in his more than two decades in power.
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It’s not yet clear what killed Prigozhin and the Wagner leadership on board, as well as the two pilots and a stewardess, but both US intelligence and some Russian media have pointed to an attack on the plane. In its preliminary analysis, Washington has raised the possibility of a bomb on board or some other form of sabotage. According to the Pentagon, the crash of the plane was likely the result of an assassination attempt on Prigozhin, but it does not appear to have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, as social media outlets close to Wagner had claimed.
US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he knew nothing about what was happening, but was not surprised either. “There isn’t much happening in Russia that Putin isn’t behind,” he said.
The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on Thursday that plane crash experts said the cause of the incident “could be an explosion in the tail section of the plane that broke away from the plane.” Local residents in the area told Russian media that they heard two explosions before seeing the plane hit the ground. Upon impact, the fuel tanks turned into a fireball.
“An attack or an explosion on board triggered the disaster,” added analysts consulted by Kommersant. “The proof is the mid-air destruction of the airliner. Its tail section was found far from the crash site and numerous holes are visible in the debris, including the wing,” they added.
The Kremlin has rejected any external analysis. “We immediately launched an investigation, a case has been opened, investigators are working. “I would suggest focusing on the facts and not on what the western media says,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as reported by the TASS news agency.
Putin: “There is no doubt here”
“There is no doubt here. Let’s see what the investigators say next. And now investigations – technical investigations and genetics – are being carried out. “It will take some time,” Putin said.
According to Putin, the website Flightradar24, which specializes in commercial aviation, itself published data from the last moments of the Embraer Legacy 600 in which Prigozhin was traveling. The remains of all the victims were so badly charred that the Tver city morgue, where they were transferred on Thursday, sent biological samples from the bodies to Moscow for genetic analysis.
The plane took off from an airfield northwest of the Russian capital at 17:59 local time. Eleven minutes later it reached an altitude of 8,500 meters and was flying level until 18:19. Then something caused the plane to crash to the ground for the last 32 recorded seconds of flight.
It took more than 24 hours for the head of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, to comment on the incident: “He didn’t see or didn’t want to see the big picture of what’s happening in the country.” I asked him to personal Setting aside ambitions for matters of the greatest national importance. Everything else could be decided later, but he was like that,” the Chechen leader said.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who was close to Prigozhin, did not comment. Lukashenko, who acted as mediator between Putin and Prigozhin during the June 23–24 mutiny, personally guaranteed the safety of Wagner’s owner in return for ending his rebellion.
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