A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment has found that the plane crash presumed to have killed Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was intentionally caused by an explosion, according to U.S. and Western officials.
One of the officials, who were not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the explosion fell in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin's "long history of trying to silence his critics."
It was not clear why several high-ranking members of Wagner, including top leaders who are normally exceedingly careful about their security, were on the same flight. The purpose of their joint trip to St. Petersburg was unknown. Putin recalled that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s and described him as "a man of difficult fate" who had "made serious mistakes in life, and he achieved the results he needed -- both for himself and, when I asked him about it, for the common cause, as in these last months. He was a talented man, a talented businessman."
Prigozhin supporters claimed on pro-Wagner messaging app channels that the plane was deliberately downed, including suggesting it could have been hit by a missile or targeted by a bomb on board. Those claims could not be independently verified. "We know this pattern -- in Putin's Russia -- deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained," she added.
The crash also came the same week that Russian media reported that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a former top commander in Ukraine who was reportedly linked to Prigozhin, was dismissed from his post as commander of Russia's air force. But instead Putin made a deal that saw an end to the mutiny in exchange for an amnesty for Prigozhin and his mercenaries and permission for them to move to Belarus."The downing of the plane was certainly no mere coincidence," Janis Sarts, director of NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told Latvian television.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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