Ukraine’s president on Thursday said the presumed death of the leader of the Wagner group is “a good thing” for Ukraine and even joked about it.
“Of course it’s a good thing for Ukraine. We have nothing to do with it, we know who did it,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s presumed death at a joint press conference with his Portuguese counterpart. , Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa at the Presidential Palace in Kiev.
And in the humor he sometimes resorts to, reminiscent of his past as a comedian, he joked on the subject, “When I asked for air support from partners, it wasn’t what I imagined.”
On Wednesday, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) said Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, was among the passengers of the private jet that crashed north of Moscow, killing all on board.
According to the same source, the passengers also included Dmitry Utkin, one of the founders of the Wagner group and a former officer of the Russian special forces.
The Russian party blames ‘specific villains’ for Prigozhin’s death
However, the leader of the Just Russia party Serguei Mironov denounced that the head of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed by “specific villains”, whom he did not name, whose “punishment will be inevitable”.
“Prigozhin was on the path of many in Russia, Ukraine and the West”wrote Mironov on social networks, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
The name Prigozhin, 62, appeared on the passenger list of a private jet that crashed for unknown reasons on a flight between Moscow and Saint Petersburg on Wednesday, according to Russian authorities.
The leader of Just Russia repeated on social media the allegations that the plane Prigozhin was traveling in was shot down by a missile or a bomb placed in the device.
Mironov said that “at some point the number of enemies increases [de Prigozhin] peaked.”
“So in the case of Prigozhin, it’s not that an abstract death found its victim, but that it was specific villains who did that,” he said.
“Wherever they are, punishment will be inevitable”, added Sergei Mironov.
A Just Russia has 28 deputies and is the third party in the Russian parliament, dominated by the United Russia party, which supports President Vladimir Putin, with 321 of the 450 elected.
Brazil’s Embraer’s private jet crashed in the Tver region, north of Moscow, killing 10 people on board.
The civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia said the passenger list also included the name of Dmitri Utkin, Prigozhin’s right-hand man and a former Russian military intelligence officer.
The Wagner Group was very active in the war in Ukraine, launched by Russia on February 24, 2022.
In late June, after capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the longest and bloodiest battle of the war, the group staged an uprising against Russian Defense Minister Serguei Shoigu.
At the time, Prigozhin demanded the resignation of Shoigu and the chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, whom he accused of ordering an attack on the Wagner group army and of incompetence in the war against Ukraine.
During the short uprising, Putin’s former ally held Russian military command in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and sent a column of mercenaries to Moscow.
The column turned back after an agreement allegedly brokered by Belarus, where thousands of Wagner group mercenaries were transferred.
Prigozhin was absent from social media for some time, but this week appeared in a video reportedly shot in Africa, before the plane crash he was supposedly traveling on.
The Kremlin (Russian Presidency) has not yet commented on the plane crash that allegedly killed the head of the Wagner group.
News updated at 12:54
Source: DN
