‘Gen Armageddon’ sacked months after going missing following Wagner coup
Wagner Group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was on the passenger list of a plane that crashed in Russia’s Tver region yesterday without survivors, according to the press service of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency. Ten people were killed in the crash near the town of Kuzhenkino, including Prigozhin.
“An investigation has been launched into the crash of the Embraer aircraft, which occurred tonight in the Tver region. According to the list of passengers, among them is the name and surname of Yevgeny Prigozhin,” the department said.
Among the dead were three crewmembers and seven passengers. The seven passengers were identified as Sergey Propustin, Evgeniy Makaryan, Aleksandr Totmin, Valeriy Chekalov, Dmitriy Utkin, Nikolay Matuseev and Prigozhin. The Agency said the plane was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
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This is as a top military commander, dubbed “General Armageddon” for using ruthless tactics, has been sacked by the Kremlin after going missing. Sergey Surovikin, a former commander of the Russian war effort in the Ukraine invasion, lost his job as head of the country’s aerospace forces.
An unnamed person familiar with the situation told RBC, a Russian outlet, that Surovikin was dismissed from his role overseeing the aerospace forces and has since been placed on “short-term leave”.
According to state-run press agency RIA Novosti, Surovikin was among at least 30 more Russian officials who were secretly VIP members of Wagner.
White House National Security Council spokesperson, Adrienne Watson, said in a statement that officials were watching the reports of the plane crash.
“If confirmed, no one should be surprised. The disastrous war in Ukraine led to a private army marching on Moscow, and now — it would seem — to this,” she said.
President Joe Biden has been briefed on the plane crash in Russia, according to the White House. Biden told reporters he didn’t “know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised.
“There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer,” he told reporters in Lake Tahoe, where he is on vacation.
Prigozhin is the head of the private paramilitary organization Wagner Group, which played a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine before briefly launching an insurrection against the Russian military in June. Forces loyal to Prigozhin marched toward Moscow, before turning back after several days.
Prigozhin allegedly struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin where he didn’t face prosecution and was relocated to Belarus, according to the Kremlin. The Russian president and Prigozhin allegedly met face to face on June 29, less than a week after the failed coup, the Kremlin said.
On July 3, Prigozhin released a message on social media claiming the rebelling was aimed at “fighting traitors and mobilizing our society.”
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