FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
After Yevgeny Prigozhin's "march to Moscow" two months ago, CIA chief William Burns predicted that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not rush his revenge.
"What we're seeing is a very complicated situation," Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in July.
While the details of what happened remain murky in the immediate aftermath of the reported death of the mercenary boss in a plane crash, what is clear is that Wagner, the mercenary organization that built Prigozhin, was essentially first shut down and then dramatically beheaded .
With Wagner's prominent role in Russia's military operations in Ukraine now severely curtailed as a result of his insurgency towards Moscow, which embarrassed Putin and the Kremlin, it seemed for a moment that Prigozhin was trying to grab some of the the influence he had gained through his operation in Africa.
Prigozhin had issued a statement in support of the coup in Niger, seen by some analysts as a reminder of how Wagner had once served the Kremlin's purposes. This week he posted a video from somewhere in Africa suggesting that, perhaps, he had found a new role and that his actions had been forgiven.
In that video, Prigozhin insisted that he was recruiting soldiers for operations in Africa, while also inviting businessmen from Russia to invest money in the Central African Republic.
He was flying over the Tver region near Moscow with other senior Wagner executives when his private jet crashed into the ground, for reasons still unclear.
It was not only Prigozhin who lost his life in the incident. With him on the flight was Dmitry Utkin, one of his closest allies, another key figure in Wagner.
He was involved in organizing the Wagner convoy that tried to drive to Moscow during the short-lived uprising. What is clear is that Wagner, as he was once created, is no more.
According to recent reports, hundreds of Wagner fighters who had been interned at bases in Belarus had begun to leave the country, some unhappy with lower pay levels and others relocating to work in west Africa.
In Russia, Wagner's operations had been on hiatus for the past two months as Prigozhin and his allies appeared to seek a new role under the shadow of Putin's displeasure.
Much of Wagner's African "empire," combining disinformation operations, commercial interests, and mercenary work, relied on the connections that Prigozhin and his close associates had established over the years.
As former Air Vice-Marshal Sean Bell, now a military analyst, predicted for Sky News in June after Wagner's march on Moscow, “without Prigozhin, Wagner is nothing”.
"If the Wagner group is Yevgeny Prigozhin, then survival without him will be difficult. The Wagner we knew will no longer exist without Prigozhin", he declared in June.
Lini një Përgjigje