|
Post by Admin on Aug 25, 2023 18:41:00 GMT
The Kremlin said Western suggestions that Russian Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had been killed on its orders in a plane crash were an 'absolute lie' while declining to definitively confirm his death, citing the need to wait for test results. More here: reut.rs/481kzDF
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 26, 2023 13:11:28 GMT
Yevgeny Prigozhin might have retired in peace some day. Or he could have been found writhing in the throes of Novichok, a nerve agent favoured by Russia's spy agencies. He might also have fallen out of a window, crashed in his car, or slipped in his bathroom -- like so many Russians lately, and like any of us potentially.
As it happens, Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, a notorious Russian private army, appears to have died when a private plane crashed while flying from Moscow to St Petersburg, killing him and the three pilots and six other passengers said to be on board.
That's assuming that Prigozhin really was on board. His death has been proclaimed twice before, once in an African plane crash. Both times Prigozhin later turned up professing surprise at reports of his own demise. What's been said about the autocratic and repressive reign of President Vladimir Putin also applies to Russia generally, including Prigozhin's Wagner Group: "Nothing is true, and everything is possible."
We do know that Prigozhin's assassination, if that's what it was, would have made a chilling kind of sense. A big question mark has floated above his head since he led a short-lived mutiny two months ago against parts of Mr Putin's government.
At the time, Prigozhin, once nicknamed "Putin's Chef" because he was so close to the big boss, professed that his uprising wasn't aimed at the president personally. But he still made Mr Putin look weak. With his KGB-trained mind and his avowed intolerance for betrayal, Mr Putin was unlikely to just let this insubordination slip. He may have deemed some sort of vengeance necessary, if only to remind potential copycat mutineers of the rules in today's Russia. When the attempted coup was over, Mr Putin promised that the "traitors" would "inevitably be punished", and "harshly".
Everything from the style of the crash to its timing now resonates with the Putin regime's macabre sort of rhyme and metre. Also, this week it was confirmed that Sergei Surovikin, a general who was said to be in cahoots with Prigozhin, was removed from his post.
The first question is what Russians should think about the news of Prigozhin's presumed death. Mr Putin wouldn't want them to interpret the hit as a sign that he's worried, although some may come to exactly that conclusion. Instead, he'd want to signal to all of his potential adversaries that insubordination means punishment up to and including death. This doesn't mean he'll no longer have enemies; only that the bar is now higher -- think Claus von Stauffenberg -- for them to plot their next steps.
That may not stop Prigozhin's hardcore supporters or Russia's ultra-nationalists, though, some of whom are now baying for revenge. If Prigozhin were yet to turn up alive, moreover, he'd immediately become an even greater threat to Mr Putin than he ever was.
A different question is what will happen to the Wagner Group if Prigozhin is indeed dead. It's long been one of the Kremlin's preferred paramilitary armies, notorious for its brutal methods, on bloody display in places such as the Sahel, the arid belt across Africa just south of the Sahara. There, Prigozhin's mercenaries have been hawking their war-waging services to any junta or dictator willing to pay -- in diamond franchises or other currency. A positive side effect from Mr Putin's point of view is that these operations often drive out the French and Americans, draw in the Russians, and push more Africans to flee en masse toward the European Union, which Mr Putin so despises. Precisely this sinister motivation is one reason why Europe will never solve its migration crisis.
Now, though, Wagner's future is in doubt. After the mutiny in June, Mr Putin's initial plan was to let Prigozhin decamp with his mercenaries to Russia's neighbour and de facto vassal state Belarus, presumably to await further instructions. Poland and the Baltic countries, which are members of the EU and Nato, have kept a wary eye on these Wagner fighters, lest they cross the border and cause mischief.
Without Prigozhin, however, the Wagner Group is, in effect, decapitated. He didn't start the outfit (which, under Russian law, shouldn't even exist at all), although its founder, Dmitry Utkin, was reportedly on the plane too. But Prigozhin became Wagner's public face, posting crude Telegram rants from Ukrainian battlefields that verged on violence porn. Wagner was an unofficial proxy of the Kremlin, but Wagner was also Prigozhin.
In this way, Prigozhin's disappearance will echo far beyond the crash site, far beyond even Russia and Ukraine, and all the way to Africa. There, yet another junta recently seized power in Niger, and may look to Wagner mercenaries to resist retribution from neighbouring African democracies, the former colonial power France, or the erstwhile superpower, America.
One way to tell if Mr Putin is sure that Prigozhin is dead will be if he names a new Wagner boss swiftly.
A third question is how foreign leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, nominally one of Mr Putin's few remaining allies, should think about the plane crash. A curious aspect of its timing is that it coincides with the Brics summit in Johannesburg, where the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are meeting in a show of defiance to the US-led West.
Mr Putin can't attend this gathering in person, because the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against him for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children -- a war crime. He's dialled in via video link, but probably found that awkward.
Will Mr Xi and the other attendees in Johannesburg interpret the hit against Prigozhin as a sign that Mr Putin is still a fearsome tsar to be reckoned with? Or as a reminder that Mr Putin cannot be a legitimate and reliable partner in their nascent geopolitical bloc?
Optimists should hope that countries such as South Africa and India, and others in the so-called Global South, now come closer to siding openly with the Ukrainians in their self-defence, and against Mr Putin the aggressor, whose reputation for ruthless brutality will become ever more of a burden for anybody who associates with him. ©2023 Bloomberg
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. A former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of 'Hannibal and Me'.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 27, 2023 13:30:12 GMT
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has been confirmed dead after genetic analysis of bodies found in Wednesday's plane crash, Russian officials have said.
The Investigative Committee said the identities of all 10 victims had been established and corresponded to those on the flight's passenger list. The Kremlin has denied speculation it was to blame for the crash.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2023 13:44:19 GMT
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) — President Vladimir Putin is not planning to attend the funeral for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin said, following reports that the mercenary chief who challenged the Russian leader’s authority would be buried Tuesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov wouldn’t say where or when the chief of the Wagner Group military company would be buried, adding that he couldn’t comment on a private family ceremony.
St. Petersburg’s Fontanka news outlet and some other media said the 62-year-old Prigozhin could be laid to rest as early as Tuesday at the city’s Serafimovskoye cemetery, which has been used for high-profile military burials. Heavy police cordons encircled the cemetery, where Putin’s parents are also buried, but no service was immediately held and increased police patrols also were seen at some other city cemeteries.
Later in the day, a funeral was held at St. Petersburg’s Northern Cemetery for Wagner’s logistics chief Valery Chekalov, who died in the Aug. 23 crash alongside Prigozin. Several hearses were seen driving from a central hall used for memorial ceremonies to Beloostrovskoye cemetery on the city’s outskirts, but they later drove away.
While it tried to avoid any pomp-filled ceremony for the man branded by Putin as a traitor for his rebellion, the Kremlin couldn’t afford to denigrate Prigozhin, who was given Russia’s highest award for leading Wagner forces in Ukraine and was idolized by many of the country’s hawks.
Putin’s comments on Prigozhin’s death reflected that careful stand. He noted last week that Wagner leaders “made a significant contribution” to the fighting in Ukraine and described Prigozhin as a ”talented businessman” and “a man of difficult fate” who had “made serious mistakes in life” but “achieved the results he needed — both for himself and, when I asked him about it, for the common cause, as in these last months.”
Although both were from St. Petersburg, Prigozhin and the Russian leader were not known to be particularly close.
Prigozhin, an ex-convict who earned millions and his nickname “Putin’s chef” from lucrative government catering contracts, served Kremlin political interests and helped expand Russia’s clout by sending his mercenaries to Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and other countries. Wagner, one of the most capable elements of Moscow’s forces, played a key role in Ukraine where it captured the Ukrainian eastern stronghold of Bakhmut in late May.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, noted that Prigozhin has become a legendary figure for his supporters who are increasingly critical of the authorities.
“Prigozhin’s funeral raises an issue of communication between the bureaucratic Russian government system that doesn’t have much political potential and politically active patriotic segment of the Russian public,” Markov said.
The country’s top criminal investigation agency, the Investigative Committee, officially confirmed Prigozhin’s death on Sunday.
The committee didn’t say what might have caused Prigozhin’s business jet to plummet from the sky minutes after taking off from Moscow for St. Petersburg. Just before the crash, Prigozhin had returned from a trip to Africa, where he sought to expand Wagner Group’s activities.
Prigozhin’s second-in-command, Dmitry Utkin, a retired military intelligence officer who gave the mercenary group its name based on his own nom de guerre, was also among the 10 people who died in the crash.
A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that an intentional explosion caused the plane to crash, and Western officials have pointed to a long list of Putin’s foes who have been assassinated. The Kremlin rejected Western allegations the president was behind the crash as an “absolute lie.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 23, 2023 12:34:17 GMT
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 22nd that President Putin's closest aide Nikolai Prigozhin, the founder of the Russian private military company Wagner, died in a jet crash in August. It was reported that the Secretary of the Security Council Patrushev had given the order for the assassination.
Based on accounts from Western intelligence agencies and former Russian intelligence officials, it is said that Mr. Patrushev ordered his aides to formulate an assassination plan in August. Putin was later presented with the plan, but said he did not object.
Mr. Patrushev had previously warned Mr. Putin that relying on Wagner in the invasion of Ukraine "gives Mr. Prigozhin excessive political and military influence and threatens the Kremlin." Patrushev, like Putin, is a former member of the State Security Committee (KGB), the intelligence agency of the former Soviet Union, and his eldest son currently serves as agriculture minister.
On the 22nd, Presidential Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied this report, calling it a "fabricated story."
|
|