After Prigozhin’s death, a Wagner commander reveals new details about the last meeting with Putin. Apparently, the head of the Kremlin gave the Wagner boss a false sense of security.
Moscow – desert insults, then he let him go: shortly after the death of the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin an insider has new details from the last meeting with Wladimir Putin revealed. After the failed coup attempt, Russia’s president summoned those responsible to the Kremlin and “yelled at the whole gang for three hours,” said a Wagner fighter in an interview with the news platform Meduza. The fact that the mercenary boss was then allowed to withdraw led Prigozhin to the wrong assumption that he was “untouchable”. A fatal mistake, as it turned out.
Plane crash in Russia: DNA test confirms Prigozhin’s death
Because Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead. Exactly two months to the day after his uprising against Russia’s military leadership over disagreements over the Ukraine war, the founder of the Wagner Group died in a plane crash over Russia. On Sunday (August 27) the investigative authority in Moscow confirmed the death. A DNA comparison showed that Prigozhin was among the ten dead occupants of the crashed private jet.
Prigozhin dead: US speculates about bomb on plane – did Putin have a hand in it?
The exact background to the plane crash remains unclear. Currently there is only speculation and no confirmed information as to the cause. Nevertheless, many in the West suspect that the power apparatus around Putin could have a finger in the pie – in revenge for the daring attempted coup. That’s how it turned out US President Joe Biden was not surprised by the crash. “There’s not much that’s happening in Russia that isn’t behind Putin,” said the man in the White House in a first reaction. Moscow, outraged, dismissed the accusation as a “lie”. Nevertheless, US intelligence services suspect that a bomb may have exploded on board the plane.
This cannot be verified independently. But what is certain is that Prigozhin fell out of favor in the Kremlin. For months he loudly criticized the conduct of the war in Ukraine and publicly accused the military leadership of being incompetent. The dispute finally culminated in the march on Moscow, with which Prigozhin wanted to bring down his opponents. He broke off his uprising only a few kilometers from the Russian capital – mediated by Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
In fact, Prigozhin seems to have expected death because of his mutiny – this shows a video that has surfaced, which was recorded before the plane crash. In it, Prigozhin talks to his deputy Dimitri Utkin, who also died on board the plane, about their punishment and the death that was believed to be almost certain.
Meeting after mutiny: Putin is said to have yelled at Prigozhin for hours
According to him, the two Wagner founders were all the more surprised Meduza-Report that the Kremlin only gave hours of lectures. Prigozhin got the impression that he wasn’t going to be killed, otherwise he would have been eliminated immediately, says the Wagner mercenary quoted above. From that point on, Prigishin considered himself “untouchable” and “decided that he was immortal.”
Wagner-Söldner unpacks: “Narrow-minded and obsessed characters
Accordingly careless you have also acted in his environment, it was said. For example, there was no decision at all that the two Wagner executives should not be on an airplane together in the future. This procedure is part of the standard protocol for heads of government and their deputies. But the security service of the mercenary force consists of “narrow-minded and obsessed characters,” said Marat Gabidullin, a former commander of one of the PMC units Meduza. Anyone who wants to can “carry a nuclear bomb past the guards – they won’t notice it,” he added. In other words: the assassin or assassins obviously had an easy time with Prigozhin. (jkf)