Russia officially confirmed on Sunday, “after genetic expertise”, the death of the boss of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigojine, whose plane crashed on Wednesday, raising suspicions of revenge from the Kremlin two months after an abortive coup.
The fall of the private jet carrying Prigojine and his close guard had occurred in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, killing ten people.
At the end of the “molecular genetic expertise” which took several days, it was established that the identities of the ten victims “correspond to the list” of the passengers and the members of the crew of the plane, announced Sunday the Russian Investigative Committee in a statement.
The names of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his right-hand man, Dmitry Utkin, a former military intelligence officer and operational commander of Wagner, appeared on this list.
The investigators have not said anything for the time of the tracks examined, evoking neither the thesis of the accident, nor those of a bomb or a surface-to-air missile.
For their part, Westerners pointed the finger at Vladimir Putin, who had called Prigojine a “traitor” for his rebellion against Moscow.
The Kremlin denied having ordered the assassination of Yevgeny Prigojine, denouncing “speculations”.
Many critics of the Russian regime or its disgraced ex-supporters have been killed or targeted in assassination attempts. The power has always denied any involvement.
Since the crash of the plane, residents of various Russian cities where the Wagner group had its training centers, from Novosibirsk (western Siberia) to Saint Petersburg (north-west), will lay flowers on improvised memorials in the honor of Evguéni Prigojine, a sign of the popularity of this warlord with some.
In Moscow, one of them, consisting of flags, flowers and portraits of Prigozhin, was erected on Varvarka Street, not far from the Kremlin.
“He was killed by his enemies. We won’t say who… But we hope those who committed this crime will pay the price,” one of Prigozhin’s supporters said in an AFP video. a man wearing a T-Shirt decorated with a large letter “Z”, the symbol of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
Wagner, who left Ukraine after his failed rebellion, remains active in Africa but his future is now up in the air. Wherever it has been deployed, this group is accused of abuses, extrajudicial executions and torture.
At the same time, hostilities continue to rage in southern and eastern Ukraine, where the Ukrainian army has been trying for weeks to break through to cut off Russian supply lines and the land corridor it has carved out. Russian army along the Ukrainian coast of the Sea of ??Azov.
Russia and the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014 have been the target of almost daily drone attacks in recent weeks, since Ukraine promised in July to extend the conflict that began in February 2022 to Russian territory.
A drone thus crashed overnight from Saturday to Sunday on an apartment building in Kursk, the capital of the region of the same name bordering Ukraine, without causing any casualties, local authorities announced.
“The windows on several floors were smashed,” said regional governor Roman Starovoit.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that two Ukrainian drones had been shot down in the Kursk region and in the Bryansk region, which also borders Ukraine. The day before, the governor of the province of Belgorod had declared that an explosive drone had killed one person there.
Ukraine was also targeted on Sunday, with its armed forces announcing that it shot down four Russian cruise missiles overnight.
The head of the Kyiv region’s military administration, Ruslan Kravchenko, said two people were injured by missile fragments.
Finally, the authorities of Kherson, in the south of Ukraine, claimed that Russian bombardments had caused the death of a woman and injured two.
In the Black Sea, an area which has experienced renewed tension since Russia left the agreement protecting Ukrainian exports, in particular cereals, by sea in mid-July, the Russian army claimed to have taken off one of its planes to prevent an American drone from crossing its border.
But Ukraine announced the same day that a second cargo ship, which was blocked in the port of Odessa by Russian threats, had set sail loaded with steel products bound for African markets and safely reached Romanian territorial waters. .
Moscow and kyiv have stepped up their military activities in the Black Sea since the end of the UN-brokered export deal.
Russia shelled Ukrainian port infrastructure, while Ukraine attacked Russian ships in its waters and on the Crimean peninsula.
On August 17, Turkey issued a warning to Moscow after the Russian Navy fired warning shots to intercept and control a Turkish company cargo ship heading for southern Ukraine.
27/08/2023 22:09:56 – Moscow (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
