A while back I watched a TV show with a plot point that featured a government agency bringing down an airplane just to kill a single person on board. Has fiction turned into real life today?
Reuters has reported that the Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday, the TASS news agency reported, citing Rosaviatsia, Russia’s aviation authority.
....The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give ample motive to the Russian state for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.
....The plane has been under US sanctions since 2019 because of its connection to Prigozhin. The Wagner chief has been reported to use the plane, including shortly after his failed mutiny, when the plane departed from St Petersburg to Belarus on the morning of 27 June.
The air defense missile theory is just rumor at this point, but who knows? It's hardly unthinkable that Vladimir Putin would do something like this. It's the kind of thing that happens when you launch a military coup in Russia, even if you call it off and apologize afterward. All ten people aboard the plane were killed.
Have to wait to see if he was actually on board that plane. However, on June 30, Ukraine's military intelligence Chief Kyrylo Budanov said that Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) had been tasked with assassinating Prigozhin.
Nice bunch of guys.
Kind of reminds me how a certain other individual kept killing off everyone near to him who wasn't loyal enough, until he was stuck in a bunker, almost entirely alone, as his enemies closed in.
Seems like this sort of thing is basic in the Authoritarian Playbook.
Video of the plane being shot down: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/15zaa3p/breaking_a_private_jet_owned_by_prigozhin_was/
When you have to avoid windows, that includes window seats on planes.
(great cover story--he just needs a good plastic surgeon)
I was under the impression that the United States did this All. The. Time. in Afghanistan and Iraq, and likely elsewhere, too. Destroy a motorcade, because Designated Bad Guy 1 might be in it? Check. Bomb a building on rumor that a meeting was being held with Designated Bad Guy 2 attending? Ditto.
"…under the impression…"
Sorry you got run over by an impression.
I heard they were shot down by a ground to air missile.
BTW, in order to complete your "both siderism", were the terrorists in Afghanistan/Iraq killing troops, as opposed to the Wagner Group which did not kill Russians? Just curious where your "logic" went.
There’s a difference between killing foreign enemies and domestic political enemies.
To clarify, I was speaking of "collateral damage", which was considered to be no big deal.
It was considered a big enough deal that the US developed the AGM-114R9X, a non-explosive drone-fired missile designed to minimize collateral damage. It has been called the ‘Flying Ginsu’, to give you an idea how it works …
There's no question Putin's Russia would shoot down a plane full of innocents; they already did that last decade. (Never mind the continued nightly shelling of schools and hospitals in UA.)
I don't know why that is supposed to be notable.
The questions I'm interested in now are about who, exactly, has control of Wagner in Africa.
Gen. Surovikin is looking for a job.
When trump says, “I am your retribution.” This is what he means for… democrats.
My pet theory is that Putin, after firing his best (but disloyal) general, Surovikin, called Prigozhin and said, "All is forgiven! I need a great general to run my Special Military Operation, and you're that man. Let's meet at our old stomping ground in St. Petersburg to discuss it. Oh, and be sure to bring Utkin with you."
Then Putin books himself to be at a concert when Prigohzin's jet gets shot down.
I can't help but ask, don't these guys ever watch gangster movies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CDlBLvc3YE
Russia isn't a country. It is a gas station run by the mafia.
I can’t fault him for getting on a plane but anyone else who got on the plane with him was either immensely stupid or had a death wish.
A Russian reporter connected to PMC Wagner confirmed that Prigozhin and all top commanders of Wagner left Africa for Russia yesterday.
They obviously felt completely safe doing so. Why did they think this?
Why did Prigozhin break off his run on Moscow and say he was only trying to replace the incompetent Shoigu, but he was still absolutely loyal to Putin?
I have long wondered at the Authoritarian mindset, in which you idealize the authorities "above" you. The mindset is hierarchical in the extreme, and shares the conservative view that there are good people who are "inside" the group, and bad people who are "outside" the group, and being absolutely loyal to your group is essential to your survival.
Basically, you subvert your own will to that of the leader, who can do no wrong, and in return, the benificent leader will protect you.
It's a philosophy which works effectively in many primitive situations, but we no longer live in a world where problems can be solved by simple but not-very-intelligent philosophies.
I really don’t know how Prigozhin could have believed he could survive after the June coup. I also don’t think that Prigozhin or the other leaders of the Wagner Group were “authoritarians” as you’ve described. That might be a fair description of the followers but these people were either leaders or willing to take the risk of proximity to essentially dead men for money.
i'd fault him for getting on a plane in russian airspace. and for being in russia at all. i can only imagine it was a decision built on hubris and his belief putin respected and needed him too much to kill him.
Could be he basically died from hubris. But also could be he knew that he was only going to live until the moment when Putin decided to kill him and not a minute longer. The fact that he got on an airplane with a bunch of people says only that he didn’t care who he took with him if Putin chose to kill him while he was flying in the plane. Basically, from June, Prigozhin was a dead man walking and I’m sure he knew it.
I'm sure it's just a tragic accident and a complete coincidence that Prigozhin was on the plane.
They are probably writing the accident report right now, since it makes it easier on the investigators. Since the aircraft was made in Brazil and the engines in the UK, those seem like the likely parties to blame.
I expect rather that Ukraine will be blamed.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle by shooting it out of the sky.
And the genie goop mixed with rain will RUIN your summer whites!
Seems like it would have been simpler and less obvious to have his buddy Lukashenko toss him out a window. Now there has to be a whole crash investigation to cover up.
Not that coverups are any kind of problem in Putin’s Russia.
OTOH, making it more obvious, an ostentatious, even dramatic, assassination of someone who was attempting or threatening a coup, might have been the point. Like using polonium.
Or like a public hanging in the old days, there’s a message we’re meant to receive.
A surprising (to me) number of American political figures have died in suspicious crashes. In no particular order after the first two, who died just before elections in which they were leading: Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Martha Mitchell, John Tower, Larry McDonald, Mickey Leland, and John Tower.
Are you trying to establish an equivalence?
How many of these planes were shot down by US ground-to-air missiles?
?Martha Mitchell died in Sloan-Kettering, a hospital, not an aircraft.
I looked them all up. All the crashes were investigated. Larry McDonald died (with 268 others) on KAL007, shot down by Soviet interceptors. John Tower died in a turboprop crash attributed to a failure of a propeller control unit; the failure mode had been incorrectly analyzed. Nothing about the others suggested sabotage or deliberate action to me. Why do you find these suspicious?