Press
The former leader of the Wagner troupe has been underground since last year. His death remains a mystery. Now his grave is being redesigned.
MOSCOW – The grave of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former leader of the Wagner Group who mutinied against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, has reportedly been filled with concrete. According to Russian media, a monument will be built there. However, other speculations are also circulating online.
Prigozhin died on August 23, 2023, when his corporate jet crashed in the Tver region of central Russia. All ten occupants of the plane were killed. Wagner co-founder Dmitri Utkin and another Wagner management representative, Valeriy Chekalov, were among the victims. It is believed that the aircraft crashed as a result of an explosion in the landing gear area. This reported a few weeks after the crash Wall Street Journal citing Western intelligence services and a former Russian intelligence officer that it was an assassination attempt. A secretary of the Russian Security Council and a close confidante of Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, ordered this.
Kremlin denies any involvement in Prigozhin’s death
According to reports, a small bomb was installed under one of the wings during an inspection shortly before departure of the private plane. About half an hour after the plane took off, an explosion tore off the wing – according to the newspaper, an assassination attempt that had been planned long in advance. Patrushev had already warned Putin about Prigozhin in the summer of 2022, but he initially ignored it. Eventually they fought Wagner mercenaries at the time successful in the Ukraine war. Only with the uprising of the Wagner troupe and the “March on Moscow” about a year later did Putin’s opinion change. When Patrushev presented him with a plan to get rid of Prigozhin, the head of state did not object.
To this day, however, the Kremlin denies having anything to do with the matter. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the report Wall Street Journals at the time as “absolute lies”. After his mutiny, Putin initially portrayed Prigozhin as a traitor who could have plunged Russia into civil war. but then made a deal with himto defuse the crisis.
The day after the crash, Putin expressed his condolences to the families of those killed and said he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s. “He was a man with a difficult fate who made serious mistakes in life,” Putin said at the time.
Funeral on a small scale: Prigozhin was buried without military honors
Despite these expressions of condolence, there is an aura of mystery surrounding the matter. It took four days after the crash for DNA analysis to confirm the identity of Prigozhin’s remains. And concerned observers immediately warned that state authorities could not be trusted. The Kremlin, apparently keen to keep its distance, said it did not know the timing or circumstances of the former ally’s funeral. Putin simply emphasized that he would not attend the funeral.
Prigozhin’s funeral finally took place on a small scale and without a military ceremony – at the Porokhovskoye cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Moscow in the middle of an industrial area. Instead of a guard of honor, police and National Guardsmen kept the journalists away. It was judged that the leader of the Wagner troupe was buried before most of the people in Russia even found out about his death Radio Liberty. Prigozhin’s death – and the dramatic circumstances of an unexplained catastrophe in the air that led to it – were ignored on state television.
The “special burial operation” continues – Prigozhin’s grave apparently covered with concrete
Because of the uncertainty surrounding the event, Russian journalists often referred to the funeral as a “special funeral operation” – a reference to Moscow’s name for the war in Ukraine. Now that the matter has grown somewhat, the Russian government apparently wants to continue this operation. The Russian tabloid Pravda According to him, both Prigozhin’s grave and that of Dmitri Utkin will be covered with concrete. The design includes two life-size figures. They are scheduled to be unveiled on June 1st. Prigozhin would have been 63 years old that day.
Given the initially rather sparse funeral, this step may seem surprising. In any case, all sorts of speculations are circulating on the Internet. A post on the short message serviceFear that Prigozhin will rise from the dead“. The comments go even further and accuse the Russian head of state of wanting to prevent possible DNA tests and autopsies in the future. Almost a year after the death of Wagner’s boss, the spell of the Prigozhin mystery remains unbroken. (tpn)
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