Eurasia note #81: Mercenary Leader Disappears In Plane Explosion

Wagner Group Yevgeniy Prigozhin's phone is found; not yet his body

• Apparent death occurred on eve of Ukraine’s independence day

• Former MI6 head says ‘all indications point’ to Putin

• Claims that flight attendant told parents plane taken for incomprehensible repairs

• There is a precedent of Western black ops at Russian airports

• The CEO of France’s Total died after discussing sale of oil for gold

• Three years to the day after Muammar Gaddafi

• Prigozhin could have been prosecuted or shot, sparing nine other lives

• The murder of inconvenient individuals is easily blamed on others

• There is good reason to suspect Western involvement

• Prigozhin’s troops are in Niger, which is the target of French and U.S. scheming

• He was just in Mali, where the U.S. accused him of securing minerals for Russia

• Africa is the West’s next target as war in Ukraine bogs down

Excerpt: “With Niger currently in dispute with France, and facing the threat of a French and U.S.-orchestrated invasion fronted by other African nations, it would hardly be in Russia's geopolitical interest to decapitate the Wagner group now.”

See Mercenary Group Quits Ukraine, Occupies Russian Military HQ - Wagner's swan song, mutiny, theatre or despair? (Moneycircus, Jun 24, 2023)

See also: “Plague, War, Famine... Africa Next. As war in Ukraine runs its course, the chaos makers may be shifting their focus” (Moneycircus, May 31, 2022).

(About 1,800 words or nine minutes of your company. )

Progozhin’s fortune originally derived from his Concord catering business, and he waited on president George W Bush when he visited president Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2006.

Tbilisi, Aug 24, 2023

A plane said to be carrying Wagner group founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin went down half way between Moscow and St Petersburg.

Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia confirmed Yevgeniy Prigozhin was among 10 people on the plane’s manifest. Definitive comments from officials said eight bodies had been recovered. Prigozhin’s phone has been found but his body has not yet been identified. Wagner executives were traveling in two planes. The second turned back after the crash.

One of those casualties was Dmitry Utkin, co-founder of the Wagner group, a 53 year-old former officer in Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, who received awards for his service in both Chechen wars, as well as in Syria. He took part in Russian operations in eastern Ukraine, from 2014.

British intelligence service MI6 is up to its neck in Ukraine (see below), having protected the wartime nationalist leader Stepan Bandera for decades until his assassination in 1959, and deeply involved in the Zelenskiy government. Former head of MI6 Sir John Sawyers told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “All the indications point to the fact that Putin has taken him out.”

Russian public figures claim that Prigozhin was killed by Ukraine or its allies as a “gift” to president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on the eve of Ukraine’s independence day. Former adviser to president Vladimir Putin, now university professor Sergei Markov, accused Ukraine’s intelligence service. The Russian president promised to drop charges in a deal that ended the Jun 23-24 mutiny.

What actually happened leaves any motive an open case, as a French government spokesman told a television news channel.

The plane belonged to MNT Aero LLC and departed from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. The flight attendant who perished with the crew reportedly told her family that unusual repairs were being made on the plane before it departed. Kristina Raspopova is said to have told her family prior to the flight that the jet was “taken away for some short-term and incomprehensible repairs,” according to the Telegram channel ВЧК-ОГПУ.

Putting together various pieces of information, there was apparently no missile trail suggesting that the two bangs heard by observers were a bomb and the fuel tank going off, which removed one of the wings. It is unlikely to be a mechanical failure as Embraer is perhaps the safest plane manufacturer in the world. MI6’s Sawyers also said it was likely a “device on board which brought it down suddenly.”

Firing missiles inside Russia would have been a measure so extreme as to be very unlikely.

A foreign intel agency would struggle to carry out such a bombing — needing access to travel plans and the plane itself. So let’s consider first Russian intel or someone inside the Wagner organisation.

The Russian military is incorporating Wagner group into the Russian Army, so that it no longer operates as a mercenary army but that would hardly require the elimination of its leadership.

Under his deal with Putin, Prigozhin was supposedly exiled to Belarus. Yet on Wednesday, before the fatal flight, he met with officials of the Moscow mayor’s office to discuss his catering company’s food contracts to public sector institutions.

His fortune originally derived from his Concord catering business, and there is a photograph of Prigozhin acting as chef when president George W Bush visited president Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2006.

Prigozhin’s refusal to fade into the shadows may have been a provocation to his rivals, but Russian intel would have no reason to cause so many casualties — after all, Putin could simply have prosecuted Prigozhin. Russia does not have the death penalty but if someone in Russian military intel, the GRU or the FSB wanted him eliminated, he could have been shot.

Some draw parallels with the murder of Russian ex-vice premier Boris Nemtsov. There is no evidence that he was killed by Russian authorities, let alone that they would do so in the shadow of the Kremlin walls.

There are more informative examples of Russian “heroes” being assassinated. In 2011 former Colonel Yuri Budanov was shot dead outside his apartment on Komsomolsky prospect, in Moscow’s Khamovniki district.

Though Chechens despised him, he continued to enjoy popular support among Russians. As a tank commander, he served in numerous battles including the Argun river gorge, where half his officers died.

He was convicted by a Russian court of the murder of a Chechen woman and served eight years in prison. Two years after his release in 2009, he was assassinated, allegedly by another Chechen of no relation to the murdered woman. There was corruption surrounding the case, a lawyer and a journalist were killed.

I mention this because it shows that there are opportunities to disguise a hit as coming from almost any direction.

If Russian military or intelligence insiders had wanted Prigozhin dead, there are many ways it could have been done, far simpler than blowing a wing off a plane over the village of Kuzhenkino in Tver region.

One wrinkle in all this is that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a former commander of Russia's forces in Ukraine, and chief of the air force, has been dismissed.

The West protrays Surovikin as an architect of the purported mutiny, although he appealled on Jun 24 for Prigozhin to withdraw.

Africa

There is another important element: The Wagner mercenaries provide security to a number of African leaders who find themselves in conflict with the “former” colonial powers such as France, as well as the U.S. which has an expanding number of bases across Africa. The U.S. State Department accuses Wagner of furthering Russian interests, helping to secure valuable mineral resources.

See: “Plague, War, Famine... Africa Next. As war in Ukraine runs its course, the chaos makers may be shifting their focus” (Moneycircus, May 31, 2022).

With Niger currently in dispute with France, and facing the threat of a French and U.S.-orchestrated invasion fronted by other African nations, it would hardly be in Russia’s geopolitical interest to decapitate the Wagner group precisely now.

Since Gen Abdourahamane Tchiani overthrew Niger’s president on 26 July, protestors in the capital Niamey have been waving Russian flags and jeering outside the French embassy.

West Africa’s chief mediator in the Niger crisis, former leader of Nigeria Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar, says military intervention remains the last option in the attempt to restore constitutional authority.

Officials in Niger confirmed Wagner PMC troops are also in that country, and Wagner itself said its role is to protect the new military administration, with a special presence in the capital, Niamey. Prigozhin may have been in Mali earlier this week.

Foreign hand

So we are back to foreign intel.

I have suggested that the West may have approached Prigozhin and induced him to stage a mutiny, but that Prigozhin may have double crossed the West.

If Prigozhin was committed to a mutiny, how to explain him calling it off so soon? I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

Therefore Wagner’s rapid capitulation to Putin made no sense.

If, however, Prigozhin had accepted, say, the $6 billion that the Pentagon said it found on its books on Jun 21, two days before Prigozhin launched the “mutiny” on Jun 23, then there would be some very angry MI6 and CIA chappies. [1]

MI6 is running Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as Scott Ritter has documented amply (see below).

As for the ability of Western intel to operate inside Russia, do not dismiss it too quickly.

Christophe de Margerie, CEO of France’s Total, died on the tarmac at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport after talks in the Kremlin to sell oil for gold instead of dollars.

De Margerie met then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev to discuss trading in gold on Oct 20, 2014. Upon leaving the meeting his jet failed to get airborne and he died on the Vnukovo runway. An asset close to both Russian and American intelligence operative told Moneycircus at the time that de Margerie was certainly assassinated — and not by Russians.

It was blamed on a snow plough driving into the path of the plane as it accelerated for take off. The driver, naturally, was accused of being drunk.

Proposing to link a regional currency to gold is what had got Muammar Gaddafi killed — on the same day three years before, Oct 20, 2011.

Erratic final speculations

According to Flight Radar RA-02795 was flying level at 8,500 metres until 6:19 p.m. Moscow time on Wednesday, when suddenly lost altitude. It then climbed to 9,100 metres, descended to 8,400, then leveled off at 8,900 — all within 30 seconds — before falling. The following plane, RA-02878, turned back after the crash.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Ukraine had nothing to do with Prigozhin’s death. “We have nothing to do with it. Everyone understands who is involved.”

The UA portal reports that a suspect is Prigozhin’s personal pilot Artem Stepanov, who is a founder of the MNT Aero company. It said Stepanov was present at the departure but is reported to have disappered.

At this time all speculations hang on when and if Prigozhins body is identified. I leave to you, dear reader, the other possiblilities.

See “Biden On Payroll Of Ukraine’s Oligarchs - Deep state compromised; escalation of war likely their only option” (Moneycircus, Jun 13, 2023)

“The West's Hypocrisy On Ukraine - White refugees, white supremacists and whitewashed wars” (Moneycircus, Mar 18, 2022)

“When The Satirists Take Charge - War is hell, bankers fund both sides and politics is theatre” (Moneycircus, Mar 6, 2022)