A 40-second clip from an old interview where Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private military group Wagner, stated that he would prefer to be killed rather than lie to his country, and spoke about an airplane breaking apart in the sky, has unleashed a wave of speculation online this Sunday regarding his presumed death. The Russian aviation authority reported that the Wagner leader was on board a private plane that crashed northwest of Moscow on Wednesday with no survivors, following two months after he led a failed mutiny against military leadership. The Kremlin described Western insinuations that he was killed on orders from him as "utter nonsense."
In the clip taken from an interview originally published on April 29 and conducted by Russian military blogger Semyon Baghdasaryan, Prigozhin expressed that Russia is on the brink of disaster because the military establishment is gradually expelling truth-tellers who refuse to comply with senior management. In the segment posted on Wagner's Gray Zone channel on Telegram, he stated, "We have reached a boiling point today. Why do I speak so openly? Because I do not have the right, in front of these people who will live in this country. They have been lied to now. It’s better to kill me."
He added, "But I will not lie. I must say frankly that Russia is on the brink of disaster, and if these gears are not adjusted today, the plane will crash in the air." Hundreds of comments were posted on Gray Zone within a few hours. Some posts speculated that Prigozhin is alive, with one comment reading, "Soon he will jump out of the snuff box and make the demons shit themselves."
Some posts pointed fingers at the Kremlin, while others blamed France, and some others pointed towards Ukraine. One post claimed that Ukraine killed Prigozhin on orders from U.S. intelligence and "the Anglo-Saxons," adding, "It is inconvenient for us to lose such a hero."
