by SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
An Embraer Legacy business jet registered to Prigozhin on its way from Moscow to Pulikovo airport outside St. Petersburg crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino, in Tver region northwest of Moscow.
The earliest reports jumped the gun claiming Russian air defense shot it down, which spurred theories that this was payback for the Russian airmen killed in Prigozhin’s revolt on June 23. But we’ll get to that theory.
Let’s start with what we know. For now, there are reports from “sources” that the bodies of Prigozhin and Utkin have in fact been identified, but this is not confirmed by more reputable or official reports yet:
The plane with Prigozhin was blown up. The bodies of Prigozhin and Utkin were identified – the source of Tsargrad in the commission of the Federal Air Transport Agency
This was later changed to:
One law enforcement official who is now at the scene of Prigozhin’s plane crash said:
“The identification of Prigozhin and Utkin is nothing but fiction. It is known that they were on board. However, it is too early to talk about identification. Inspection of the scene and identification has not been carried out yet.
Now they have arranged lights, waiting for everyone from Moscow. The inspection has not been carried out yet, several corpses without heads, inside and away from the cabin, mixed parts of corpses. Personal belongings have not been searched. The explosion technicians are still examining everything around”.
Let’s examine all the theories and possibilities one by one, and make some projections about potential outcomes of this event.
Firstly, it can’t be ignored that this occurred on 8/23 while the Wagner coup was on 6/23, the day when the Russian airmen were killed. Someone could be making a symbolic gesture to redeem the memories of the killed airmen.
Now as to the AD missile theory. A number of images have been released of the wreck. Some like the following show what appear to be fragmentation perforations from an AD missile:
Some may recall the infamous MH17 shoot down, with the fragmentation holes all over the cockpit:
However, other photos from the Prigozhin jet crash site seem to show no such evidence at all:
Interestingly, if I’m understanding the photos correctly, the tail empennage completely separated from the rest of the craft while still in the air, which could imply an internal explosion that neatly blew the plane apart at the rear or center.
Edit: this new video appears to show the tail and airframe/fuselage intact up until it breaks up near the ground and the tail separates:
Eyewitnesses describe 2 to 3 explosions, one man seemingly implying the plane just exploded on its own:
Another eyewitness video shows the plane falling, apparently without its empennage. You can hear the loud sound of a jet engine, which led some to assume it was a “fighter jet nearby” that shot the business jet down, though it’s far more likely it’s the sound of Prigozhin’s plane’s engines:
However, a noteworthy fact is that there does appear to be a sort of contrail in the air roughly commensurate with an AD missile explosion. It could also be something else, from an internal explosion of the plane itself—it’s impossible to tell for certain.
🇬🇧 A subscriber noticed an interesting detail after analyzing data from the Flight-Radar service. According to the radar records, even before the crash, the plane managed to lose 100 knots of speed and sharply increase it, despite the fact that the altitude all this time continued to increase.
In simple words, such metamorphoses took place even before the moment of the fall. It is also difficult to explain such a change in characteristics by the fall itself: usually the stall speed is less than 150 knots.
All this, of course, does not allow determining the exact cause of the business jet crash: it will be determined by the commission. However, in any case, the version with an emergency situation on board against the background of the absence of large traces of striking elements on the fuselage will also be considered on an equal basis with the others.
I’m not a civilian airline expert. Perhaps someone in the comments can chime in—is it normal to dip your speed like that, up and down as seen above?
Reportedly, Prigozhin usually flew with 2 planes and switched between them, with only a tiny circle knowing which plane he would be on at any given time:
Valery Chekalov, who died along with Prigozhin, was the only one who knew about the businessman’s movements – it was he who led the transport logistics
According to a Readovka source, Valery Chekalov, who died along with Prigozhin, is the only one who knew exactly where the businessman was and at what time. He was responsible for all movements and transport logistics. However, he himself had nothing to do with the security service.
In addition, Chekalov was Prigozhin’s deputy for a number of important issues – in particular, he was one of those responsible for the supply of ammunition. As a rule, Chekalov and Prigozhin flew on different aircraft, but this time he was on the same plane as the businessman.
Such tactics of course are standard for high profile VIP individuals. Prigozhin’s penchant for disguises and things of that nature was already uncovered last time.
The one puzzling thing it does bring up however is that if the act was carried out by way of explosive planted on the plane, how would the perpetrators know which plane to “mine” if he infact kept it hidden up until the last moment? There was a report stating that Russian authorities now recovered footage, presumably from the airport, showing exactly which plane he boarded in an effort to confirm his death. So if it was a governmental hit job, they would have known at the last minute which plane he boarded, but this would not have given enough time to plant an explosive on it.
Of course, both planes could conceivably have been mined with an explosive. Or Prigozhin himself could have somehow accepted an explosive device, unbeknownst, in the same way that Vladlen did when he accepted the statue/bust of his likeness.
So now let’s use that to segue into theories of who or how it could have been done. Cui bono and who stands to gain or lose from this?
Firstly, let’s state the obvious: if Putin or the FSB wanted to “off” Prigozhin, they likely would not have done so in such an obvious way, over Russian territory, near Moscow, etc. That style of assassination stinks of the laughable Boris Nemtsov CIA type of hit, on the steps of the Kremlin as fodder for the gullible Western masses who could possibly buy that Putin would assassinate someone literally on Kremlin grounds.
So the Prigozhin hit has indications of being an outside force trying to frame Russia with the presumable intention of starting, or continuing, the internecine war between the Wagner-loyal faction and the Kremlin/MOD. Of course, it’s possible that a rogue S-300/400 commander used the opportunity to get one back “for the boys” killed by Prigozhin’s people on June 23. However, given what we now know about Prigozhin’s devious plane-hopping, such a rogue commander would not know which plane to target, given that 2 of Prigozhin’s planes were in the air at the same time, one of which returned and landed in Moscow after the first one’s downing.
We could perhaps argue that the “rogue commander” was being fed precise info by a military faction in the form of some general who wanted revenge, and they had more accurate information on exactly which plane to shoot down. That is possible. However the debris photos seen above don’t appear to indicate an AD missile in my view. The 2 or 3 explosions heard by eyewitnesses is also an intriguing and peculiar clue, particularly given that if an onboard explosive device was used, it would likely not lead to several explosions of that sort.
Take it with a grain of salt but we have the following rumors:
CHVK-OGPU:
“Relatives of flight attendant of Prigozhin Kristina Raspopova, with reference to the words of the girl, was told about strange manipulations with the plane before the last flight. It was taken away for some short-term and incomprehensible repairs.”
And:
They’re both from the VChK-OGPU propaganda outlet, but it’s something to chew on.
As I said, the June 23 to August 23 symbolism would appear to point to “pay back”, however this can also be taken advantage of and utilized by a 3rd party in order to frame Russia.
But could Ukraine/CIA or some such 3rd party have carried this out? It’s difficult to believe them gaining access to Moscow airport in a way that would allow them to plant a bomb there, though the above claims he was lured with an expensive wine gift, perhaps playing to his vanities in the same way that Vladlen’s statue/bust played to his. But it’s still hard to believe the SBU could have somehow fooled the notoriously cunning and suspicious Prigozhin with an explosive package of some sort—though we can’t discount anything.
Could they have shot the plane down in the sparsely populated region with some type of anti-air capability smuggled from Ukraine? Well, the plane’s altitude appeared to be nearly 30k feet at the time of the catastrophic “event”. There is almost nothing in existence that you could smuggle over a border that can shoot an object down at that height. Manpads top out at 12-15k, give or take. No drone in existence can reach that altitude, other than the gigantic American RQ-4 Global Hawk or something like that. You’d need a Buk or S-300 type system to reach that altitude, and that would be impossible to hide.
In general an air defense missile shot at the craft would be difficult to hide as there would be a contrail at least part of the flight (for the early booster stage) visible by many people, so the likelihood of an AD missile shoot down is low. Some will point to the alleged Buk shoot down of MH17 but a rural village in the most sparse part of Donbass does not quite compare to the region outside Moscow.
Thus my conclusion is the plane likely exploded from within, and if that’s the case, it would point more strongly to the FSB as I would find it difficult to believe that Prigozhin would have fallen for accepting some kind of disguised explosive device from someone like an SBU member on the ground, nor would such a device be easily triggered at 30k feet as it would be nearly impossible to use any of the most common methods like a cellphone trigger, etc.
The mystery remains. The only other conceivable option is an inside job of some sort. Someone on Prigozhin’s own team who knew he had to go, for whatever reason. A close trusted associate who knew all his boss’s ins and outs would be a candidate for being able to effectively plant an explosive of some kind. A piece of luggage from a person like this would not trigger Prigozhin’s suspicion, for instance.
The sound of multiple explosions is still problematic but there could have been some kind of secondary blasts from the engines or something else perhaps.
Lastly, I want to mention the possibility—remote as it is—that Prigozhin and Utkin are not even dead. For the record, as of this writing it has been emphasized that identification of the bodies has not yet occurred, as the explosives specialists were first on site gathering evidence and determining fault. Yes, I know many channels posted confirmations from various people including those “close to Wagner”, etc. But there’s always the possibility that either the trickster staged his own death to escape what he saw as a likely fate, or for whatever reason the Russian gov’t itself was complicit in offgridding him; particularly given the odd indeterminate trickery of the two planes both belonging to him in the sky at the same time, and later reports that he was actually on the flight logs of both planes. In this game, I don’t trust anything I don’t see with my own eyes, and I didn’t see who debarked when the second plane landed back in Moscow. Most likely him and Utkin are dead, but I’m simply putting it out there to cover all bases. Who knows, maybe Putin, in a final moment of forgiveness showed mercy on Prigozhin and allowed him to fake his own death in exchange for disappearing and handing Wagner over to Shoigu/Russia. Stranger things have happened.
