Since Wednesday and the presumed death of Yevgueni Prigojine, international leaders and their chancelleries have multiplied declarations. Reactions tinged for the most part with a strong suspicion about the reasons for the crash of a plane, between Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, counting the leader of the Wagner militia among the registered passengers.
On the very evening of the crash, US President Joe Biden said he was “not surprised” by the businessman’s possible death. “Not much happens in Russia without Putin having something to do with it,” he added, from the mountains of the American West where he is with his family. “We have seen what has been reported. If confirmed, it would come as no surprise to anyone,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the US Executive National Security Council, said earlier.
In Europe, the spokesman for the French government estimated Thursday that there were “reasonable doubts” on “the conditions” of the air crash whose boss of the paramilitary group, at the origin of a rebellion in June in Russia, would be one of the victims.
“No coincidence”
For Olivier Véran, Evgueni Prigojine is above all “the man of Putin’s low works. What he did is inseparable from the policy of Putin, who entrusted him with the responsibility of carrying out his abuses at the head of the Wagner Group. “Prigozhin leaves behind mass graves. It leaves behind a mess in a large part of the globe, I am thinking of Africa, Ukraine, Russia itself,” the government spokesman said.
Same doubts in Germany, where Annalena Baerbock, head of diplomacy, judged that this accident was “no coincidence” and that everyone suspects the Kremlin of being behind the crash of this plane belonging to Evgueni Progojine. “It’s no coincidence that the whole world is now looking to the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-Putin aide literally suddenly falls from the sky two months after attempting a rebellion,” Ms. Baerbock told a conference in press in Berlin, pointing out that there was a dictatorial system in Russia “based on internal and external violence”.
“Criminal Prigozhin will not be missed by anyone in Belarus. He was a murderer and should be remembered as such,” wrote Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, leader of the Belarusian opposition in exile, on X (formerly Twitter). His death could mean the end of the Wagner Group’s presence in Belarus, she adds. It is indeed in this country that the boss of Wagner had officially found refuge, after his abortive putsch.
