(NewsNation) – The Pentagon said it was “probable” that Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash caused by a deliberate explosion on board.
However, there is no official confirmation of Prigozhin’s death. In 2019, Prigozhin was reported dead in a plane crash in Africa, only to resurface three days later.
Former KGB agent Jack Barsky said there are still more questions than answers and “we may never know the truth” about what happened. However, he said there was “no way possible” that Prigozhin or his men allegedly on board had not checked the plane for a bomb.
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“These guys were some of the fiercest warriors and extremely well trained,” Barsky said Thursday in Elizabeth Vargas Reports. “They don’t make such stupid mistakes.”
Prigozhin was the head of the private Wagner military group that Russia has deployed in Africa, Syria and Ukraine.
According to the Russian Civil Aviation Authority, he and six other passengers were on a private jet that crashed shortly after take-off from Moscow on Wednesday with a crew of three. Rescuers found ten bodies and Russian media quoted anonymous sources in Wagner as saying Prigozhin was dead. There is currently no official confirmation.
It was not clear why several high-ranking Wagner members, including top politicians who are usually extremely concerned about their safety, were on the same flight. The purpose of their joint trip to St. Petersburg was unknown.
“He and his group were very safety conscious. “There is no incident where senior people from the Wagner group are on the same plane,” Barsky said.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the crash, but acknowledged he did not have solid information at the time to support his assumption.
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Earlier in the summer, Prigozhin led a short-lived uprising against Putin, marching hundreds of miles from southern Russia toward Moscow to show his displeasure with the Russian military’s handling of supplies and living conditions for Wagner troops.
The convoy turned back before reaching Moscow, and Prigozhin headed for Belarus.
If the Russian president had actually given the go-ahead for an assassination, Barsky says the plan would have been a closely guarded secret by a small group of people within Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.
“Russian intelligence inherited its DNA from the KGB, and the only thing the KGB was very, very good at was subdividing and limiting the number of people who know, very small, so that when Putin comes out and an explanation there is.” “Not a single person who is both knowledgeable and courageous or fundamentally suicidal to publicly disagree with Vladimir Putin,” Barsky said. “This was the only way something like this could have been planned and implemented.”
In his initial comments on the crash, Putin said the passengers made “a significant contribution” to the fighting in Ukraine.
“We remember it, we know it, and we will not forget it,” the president said in a televised interview with the Russian-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin.
Putin recalled that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s and described him as “a man with a difficult fate” who “made serious mistakes in life and achieved the results he needed – both for himself and when I asked him about it.” , for the common cause, like in these last few months. He was a talented man, a talented businessman.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Source : www.newsnationnow.com