The death of Prigozhin would not be the end of the Wagner group, says Nico Lange, an expert on security policy, in an interview with tagesschau24. It will continue to play a role in Africa – probably no longer in Ukraine.
Security expert Nico Lange assumes that the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was on board the crashed plane and is dead. He considers it realistic that the Kremlin could be responsible for the crash. “Russia is a mafia state in which internal problems are obviously solved using mafia methods,” Lange said in an interview tagesschau24. According to Lange, it would “fit into the picture”. “Anyone who poisons former agents in London with polonium is also likely to cause planes to crash.”
To person
Nico Lange is a Senior Fellow at the Munich Security Conference and was Head of Management at the Federal Ministry of Defense until early 2022. He lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine for a long time and is fluent in Russian and Ukrainian. Lange currently teaches at the Chair of Military History at the University of Potsdam.
It is conceivable that the Wagner Group recently felt too safe again, so that they have undertaken such flights again – this flight was not the first in Russia either, according to Lange. “Perhaps the goal was to reassure them before vengeance struck.”
Wagner’s Africa business “attractive”
The question now is who will continue the “attractive business” of the Wagner Group, especially in Africa. “I assume that Putin has appointed or will appoint someone to run this business,” Lange said. “The Wagner group originally came into existence as an extension of the Russian military intelligence service to do things of a military nature, of which one can then say, ‘It wasn’t us, it wasn’t the Russian state’. Russia continues to see such an instrument needs,” says Lange. “Whether it’s called the Wagner Group or something else, or who exactly gets this job, that’s perhaps not so important from a Russian perspective.”
It will definitely continue, explains Lange. However, in his opinion, the Wagner group will probably not be seen again in the Ukraine. In Syria, too, according to Lange, it appears that the Russian armed forces have taken control.