AN Embraer-135 private jet crashed in the Tver Region north of Moscow on Wednesday. All 10 people on board were killed, according to preliminary data.
Businessman and mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, was on the plane. He had been used by Putin to fight the war in the Ukraine, but recently fell out with his master and led his private army on a march to Moscow that was described as a military coup attempt.
The TASS news agency said yesterday that the aircraft was heading from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to St Petersburg and had received a permit for the use of air space by the MNT-Aero company, which specialises in providing private jet services.
The list of passengers included key members of the private Wagner military company such as Dmitry Utkin and Valery Chekalov, the Russian aviation agency said. The Russian aviation agency is currently investigating the crash.
A team from the Russian Investigative Committee has been dispatched to the crash site.
According to experts in investigating air traffic accidents, the crash could have been caused by an explosion in the tail section of the aircraft. The experts said that holes in the fuselage and wings suggest that the business jet may have been downed by a missile strike.
Experts now believe that the crash could have been caused by a missile attack or an explosion on board rather than by a technical malfunction or human error.
It has, however, put the Wagner Group out of business.
An official at the Western Regional Investigation Department of the Russian Investigative Committee told Kommersant that no evidence proving a terrorist attack had yet been found, so a criminal investigation has been launched under Article 263 of the Russian Criminal Code.
‘Official reports contain all the necessary commentary. It is now up to investigators to take action,’ Alexander Yushchenko, member of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament) and head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s press service, told Kommersant. ‘I believe that no one should draw hasty conclusions. Investigative teams are working and the regional governor is in control,’ Yaroslav Nilov, deputy chief of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR)’s State Duma faction, told the paper.
Meanwhile, Foreign and Ukrainian journalists have been banned from visiting and reporting from the line of contact in the Ukraine.
A report on the matter, which appeared in the European media early in the week, was later confirmed by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, Izvestia notes.
The new slant in news coverage is intended to prepare Western public opinion for an upcoming shift in the prevailing narrative away from incessant talk of imminent victory, toward the recognition of the inevitability of a political settlement, said Denis Denisov, an expert at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation.
Experts pointed out that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s overly ambitious promises are one of the reasons why the West’s information support is declining.
Denisov noted: ‘Zelensky has painted himself into a corner with his rhetoric. Overambitious plans and unfounded expectations for the counteroffensive have simultaneously given impetus to a huge layer of nationalist opposition within the country, leaving Zelensky with no way to back down in terms of his relations with Kiev’s Western partners. Everyone was expecting success in the much-hyped counteroffensive, but in reality everything came to naught.’
It seems that Putin has decided to literally dump the mercenary fighters and criminal gangsters that gathered around Wagner in preparation of a new round of peace talks, as the failure of Zelensky’s ‘counter-offensive’ becomes clearer and clearer.
Workers in Russia refused to rally around the Wagner coup attempt. Now the Russian workers must take a huge step forward, and force through, with a political revolution, the reconstitution of the USSR and return to rule through workers peasants and soldiers soviets.
With revolutionary situations rapidly developing all over the capitalist world from Washington to London, Paris and Berlin, what is required NOW is the building of the Fourth International to lead the World Socialist Revolution to its victory!
