Follow us on social

2023-06-13t142545z_1603288776_rc28a1anluac_rtrmadp_3_ukraine-crisis-russia-prigozhin-scaled

Rogue Wagner Group chief Prigozhin killed in fatal plane crash

Only two months ago, the founder of the mercenary group had led a mutiny against Moscow. Talk of assassination is already in the air.

Analysis | Europe

Update 8/23, 5:40 p.m. ET: Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on board the plane that crashed in Russia on Wednesday, adding that "all on board were killed."


Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private militia group known as the Wagner Group, was reportedly killed in a plane that crashed in Russia on Wednesday. Russia’s emergency ministry said that all 10 people on the aircraft died, including seven passengers and three pilots, though it did not immediately confirm whether Prigozhin had been on board. 

Russian officials have said that a man with Prigozhin’s name was among the passengers on the flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg. NBC News’ Richard Engel noted on Twitter that a Wagner-affiliated Telegram group claimed that a second plane attributed to Prigozhin’s fleet landed safely at Ostafyevo Airport.

According to the Financial Times, “The aircraft, an Embraer Legacy, was the same that Prigozhin had regularly used to travel around Russia and as far away as Africa, according to flight tracking site Flightradar24.”

Wagner-affiliated Telegram accounts have claimed that the plane was shot down by Russian air defenses. 

“We have seen the reports. If confirmed, no one should be surprised,” wrote Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, on Twitter. 

The Wagner group chief has been in the headlines this year for his involvement in the war in Ukraine and his disputes with leadership in Russia, which culminated in his group’s aborted “march on Moscow” earlier this summer. 

As The Quincy Institute's George Beebe and Anatol Lieven noted in  May, Wagner had “gained new prestige after taking the lead in the bloody and long-drawn-out, but ultimately successful battle for the town of Bakhmut.” The leader of the mercenary group, however, quickly soured on leadership in Moscow.

“Prigozhin has long been critical of Russia’s military leadership, complaining publicly about its incompetence and corruption, and contrasting its purported passivity and incompetence to what he portrays as Wagner’s patriotism and bravery in defending the motherland’s interests in Ukraine, Syria, and beyond,” Beebe and Lieven wrote, about month before the short-lived mutiny.

“But his recent interview on the internet channel Telegram marks a drastic escalation and extension of his long-standing attacks (...) He is now attacking the entire conduct of the war in Ukraine and declaring its results to date to have been a disastrous failure.” 

On today’s events, Lieven said there will be “a very widespread assumption that he was assassinated, on the orders either of President Putin himself, or of Prigozhin's long-standing enemies within the Russian military, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov.” Lieven adds:

We will probably never know for sure the truth behind the crash of Prigozhin's plane, but the assumption of an assassination will be strengthened by the fact that on the same day, it has been announced that air force chief General Sergei Surovikin has been fired. Surovikin was close to Prigozhin, and though he appeared in public during the Wagner mutiny to appeal to the Russian military to remain loyal to the state, ever since then he has been kept out of public view and — it has been assumed — in detention.

Prigozhin had largely left the public eye after ending his revolt attempt and striking a deal with Putin, in which he agreed to relocate his fighters to Belarus. The mercenary head has reportedly been spotted in Belarus and Russia since then, but he apparently re-emerged on video for the first time on Monday, suggesting he was in Africa, as part of an effort to “Wagner in recent years has deployed thousands of its troops in at least five different countries across the continent. The mercenary group has been accused of being involved in massacres and other human rights abuses in Mali and elsewhere

The Russian media outlet Sirena pointed out that Prigozhin was falsely reported to have been among the dead in an October 2019 plane crash in Congo before eventually resurfacing. 


FILE PHOTO: Founder of Wagner private mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin speaks with servicemen during withdrawal of his forces from Bakhmut and handing over their positions to regular Russian troops, in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in an unidentified location, Russian-controlled Ukraine, in this still image taken from video released June 1, 2023. Press service of "Concord"/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. MANDATORY CREDIT./File Photo
Analysis | Europe
American Special Operations
Top image credit: (shutterstock/FabrikaSimf)

American cult: Why our special ops need a reset

Military Industrial Complex

This article is the latest installment in our Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft project series highlighting the writing and reporting of U.S. military veterans. Click here for more information.

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have left indelible imprints on our society and our military. In some cases, these changes were so gradual that few noticed the change, except as snapshots in time.

keep readingShow less
Recep Tayyip Erdogan Benjamin Netanyahu
Top photo credit: President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Shutterstock/ Mustafa Kirazli) and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Salty View/Shutterstock)
Is Turkey's big break with Israel for real?

Why Israel is now turning its sights on Turkey

Middle East

As the distribution of power shifts in the region, with Iran losing relative power and Israel and Turkey emerging on top, an intensified rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara is not a question of if, but how. It is not a question of whether they choose the rivalry, but how they choose to react to it: through confrontation or peaceful management.

As I describe in Treacherous Alliance, a similar situation emerged after the end of the Cold War: The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the global distribution of power, and the defeat of Saddam's Iraq in the Persian Gulf War reshuffled the regional geopolitical deck. A nascent bipolar regional structure took shape with Iran and Israel emerging as the two main powers with no effective buffer between them (since Iraq had been defeated). The Israelis acted on this first, inverting the strategy that had guided them for the previous decades: The Doctrine of the Periphery. According to this doctrine, Israel would build alliances with the non-Arab states in its periphery (Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia) to balance the Arab powers in its vicinity (Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, respectively).

keep readingShow less
Havana, Cuba
Top Image Credit: Havana, Cuba, 2019. (CLWphoto/Shutterstock)

Trump lifted sanctions on Syria. Now do Cuba.

North America

President Trump’s new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba, announced on June 30, reaffirms the policy of sanctions and hostility he articulated at the start of his first term in office. In fact, the new NSPM is almost identical to the old one.

The policy’s stated purpose is to “improve human rights, encourage the rule of law, foster free markets and free enterprise, and promote democracy” by restricting financial flows to the Cuban government. It reaffirms Trump’s support for the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which explicitly requires regime change — that Cuba become a multiparty democracy with a free market economy (among other conditions) before the U.S. embargo will be lifted.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.