Evgeny Prigozhin - Dead Man Talking
Evgeny Prigozhin made himself a household name in the West when he and his Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow exactly 2 months ago. The mutiny he led caused Vladimir Putin and other senior officials to reportedly flee Moscow before Prigozhin was eventually persuaded to turn back thanks to the mediation of Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Yesterday, Prigozhin’s plane was reportedly shot down over Russian territory by Russia anti-aircraft systems, killing him, as well as the group’s military commander Dmitry Utkin, whose “Wagner” call-sign is how the mercenary unit got its name. There is an irony, which may not be unintentional, in how this killing happened, given that during their march on Moscow the mercenaries shot down a number of Russian MoD planes, killing several pilots.
As I said at the time of the mutiny, Putin cannot be seen to have allowed Prigozhin to get away with this:
