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Crash comes two months after the attempted mutiny
Jet Carrying Wagner Leaders Crashes in Russia
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Jet Carrying Wagner Leaders Crashes in Russia
On Wednesday, August 23rd, Russian media reported that a private jet crashed in the Tver region. Quickly information came out that the aircraft was carrying Yevgheny Prigozhin along with other leaders of the Wagner Group.. The cause of the crash is not yet confirmed but video from the incident, posted below, appears to show a plane that has suffered a catastrophic event and falling from a high altitude. Additionally, locals in the area reported hearing a bang followed by the jet plummeting to the ground.
Two months to the day before his plane crashed, Prigozhin led a mutiny against Moscow in an event that had much of the world in shock. Prigozhin and his Wagner fighters faced no real opposition from the Russian military or police forces and ended up shooting down multiple Russian aircraft during the operation. Once on the outskirts of Moscow, an announcement was made that Belarusian president Lukashenko had brokered a deal between Prigozhin and Putin and that Wagner would return to their camps.
Prigozhin has been relatively quiet since the end of the mutiny and only recently made a video appearance in Africa where his forces continue to operate.
Included in the list of passengers killed in the crash are: Prigozhin, Dmitry Utkin, the founder of Wagner, Sergey Skippin, Evgeny Makaryan, Alexander Totmin, Valery Chkalov, Nikolai Matuseev and three crew members: aircraft commander Alexey Levshin, co-pilot Rustam Karimov, flight attendant Kristina Raspopova.
Russian officials said they were able to recover eight badly burned bodies from the crash site but none have yet been named. The Russian Federal Agency for Air Transport has launched an investigation into the cause of the crash.
The death of Prigozhin, Utkin and some of the other Wagner leaders onboard leaves open the question of what will happen to the organization. The name may change or they could be rolled into another organization, but Wagner serves a specific, important purpose for Russia that doesn’t go away with Prigozhin’s removal.
https://t.me/tass_agency/206542
https://www.rt.com/russia/581735-prigozhin-plane-crash-facts/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66596127
https://apnews.com/article/russia-wagner-prigozhin-jet-crash-a7859e4e57f2efa2547dfbe5bdbaa1b2
Total Casualties Near Half a Million - NYT Report
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