The Empire Strikes Back

Prigozhin really looked and acted like pure evil. Seriously, like a real life Dr. Evil. He also seemed to pretty much have a death wish the way he acted vis-a-vis his attempted coup.

I thought he looked and acted like Mike from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, but yeah like nobody saw this coming.

Wonder if some new guy will take over Wagner?  Bunch of bad hombres looking for something to do.

“It’s coming down quickly in a spin, and it’s trailing a lot of smoke. So, this is an aircraft that was on fire. And it looks like some structural pieces, aerodynamic surfaces, were missing,” veteran science and aerospace reporter Miles O’Brien told CNN after reviewing footage of the plane’s fall.  “An aircraft like this … they just don’t catastrophically drop out of the sky without something very unusual happening,” he said.  An event like this could be caused by an explosion either inside or outside the aircraft, O’Brien added – like an explosive going off on board, or the aircraft being hit by a missile.  David Soucie, a former safety inspector with the US Federal Aviation Administration, echoed this possibility, saying the plane’s fall looked like it had only one wing left.

Was the Incident Staged?   Russian Telegram channel Baza, linked to Russia's security services, said on Wednesday that "Prigozhin has already 'died' before," adding the Wagner financier was thought to have died in a plane crash in the fall of 2019.   Russian media reported in October 2019 that Prigozhin may have been killed when an An-72 military transport plane crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It later emerged he was not on the aircraft.   Eastern-European outlet Visegrad 24 asked in a post to X: "Is it possible that the crash is a clever ploy by Prigozhin to fake his own death and disappear?"

Prigozhin left After the Crash?   Citing flight-tracking data, some speculate that a second plane owned by Prigozhin also left Moscow for St. Petersburg at around the same time, with some suggesting the Wagner chief was on this second plane.   Christo Grozev, of investigative outlet Bellingcat, added, "everyone is holding their breath" to see whether Prigozhin would emerge alive from the second jet."   There is too little information known, but factually, we know that one of his two private jets crashed. The other one landed safely," 

A Prigozhin Doppelganger?   There has also been speculation in recent months about whether Prigozhin has been using a body double, as the Wagner leader previously lost part of a finger, yet appeared to have all of his digits intact in photographs from earlier this year.   Following the Wagner mutiny in late June, photographs also emerged appearing to show Prigozhin donning a range of disguises, including a series of wigs.   "He is a trickster, a troll," one source told Russian independent news outlet Meduza. "He has informants in various structures, so we have to wait."

^ it's a card in the deck.  

So, yeah. It's complicated.

In a televised meeting, Putin offered his condolences to the victims of the crash. He said Prigozhin was "a person with a complicated fate."

https://www.axios.com/2023/08/24/yevgeny-prigozhin-plane-crash-killed-putin