‘Plane will fall..’ Yevgeny Prigozhin’s old video sparks theories on his fate
The Wagner mercenary group chief has reportedly died in a plane crash as Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the list of passengers on the plane that crashed on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg. A BBC report cites the executive jet showed that no signs of trouble until a sudden drop in its final 30 seconds of received altitude. His sudden death in a plane crash has also sparked conspiracy theories and suggestion that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin were behind this ‘accident’.
Meanwhile, a old 40-second clip of an interview showed wherein the Russian mercenary boss Prigozhin had said that said he would rather be killed than lie to his country. In the video he had also talked about a plane disintegrating in the sky, report by Reuters stated.
Russia’s aviation authority said the Wagner group chief was on a private jet that crashed northwest of Moscow with no survivors on Wednesday. This came exactly two months after he led a failed mutiny against army chiefs. The Kremlin said Western suggestions he had been killed on its orders were an “absolute lie.”
In the clip, taken from an interview originally published on April 29 with Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov, Prigozhin said Russia was on the brink of disaster because the defence establishment was gradually kicking out truth-tellers who refused to suck up to upper management, Reuters has reported.
“Today we have reached the boiling point,” he said in the clip published on Grey Zone, Wagner’s Telegram channel. “Why am I speaking so honestly? Because I don’t have the right, before those people who will live on in this country. They are now being lied to. Better kill me,” he said.
“But I will not lie, I must say honestly that Russia is on the brink of disaster. And if these cogs are not adjusted today, then the plane will fall apart in the air,” he added.
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Since the video came out, hundreds of responses had been posted on Grey Zone within a few hours. “But he knew,” a Telegram user said. Some also speculated that Prigozhin was alive. One said he would “soon jump out of a snuffbox and make the devils crap themselves.” Another said it would be cool if Prigozhin and Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s war effort, reportedly removed as head of the air force the day of the crash, “are sitting in Jamaica, drinking pina colada and taking a drag on a huge joint.”
Some even said, “You have to be an amoeba not to understand this.” While some posts blamed France, others Ukraine. One post said Ukraine had killed Prigozhin by order of US special services “and the Anglo-Saxons” and added, “it is inconvenient for us to lose such a hero,” to which someone responded with three crying-laughing emojis.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin broke his silence on the plane crash that reportedly killed mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and other senior members of the Wagner paramilitary group. He offered his sincere condolences to the families of all the victims. In televised comments, Putin described the plane crash as a ‘tragedy’ while paying a qualified tribute to the mercenary boss and his paramilitary group, according to a report published by the news agency AFP.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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Updated: 27 Aug 2023, 06:59 AM IST
