"A talented man" but "with a difficult fate, who has made serious mistakes in life". With what looks like an epitaph, Vladimir Putin writes the final word on the life of Yevgeny Prigozhin, after a 24-hour silence on the crash of the jet in which the head of Wagner lost his life yesterday together with the military commander Dmitry Utkin. No official confirmation of Prigozhin's presence on the plane, whose 10 occupants died.
"Preliminary data suggest that there were men from Wagner on board," the Russian president limited himself to saying . But by now there seems to be little doubt about the exit from the scene of the founder of the military company, and of his own creature, to whom Putin has reserved the honor of arms by recognizing the "significant contribution to our common cause of the fight against the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine ».
The tsar has promised that an investigation into what happened will "go to the end", while all kinds of hypotheses, from missiles to bombs, are rampant in the media and on the web. But among the opponents and foreign governments, especially from the enemy Ukraine, many are pointing the finger at Putin, suspected of having taken revenge on Prigozhin two months after the attempted Wagner mutiny. " We have nothing to do with it, everyone knows who is responsible," said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Although from Johannesburg, where he attended the BRICS summit, Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov urged "to focus on the facts and not on the statements of the Western media".
(Unioneonline)