Putin breaks silence on Prigozhin’s death – follow latest on Ukraine war

Vladimir Putin has praised Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin as “a talented businessman”.

Breaking his 24-hour silence on the crash, the Russian president sent his condolences to the families of all 10 people killed when the private jet crashed near Moscow.

The outcome of the official investigation into the crash must be awaited, which would take some time, Mr Putin said.

He made the remarks while speaking with the Russian-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, in a televised interview.

A group of Russian militants who fight on the Ukrainian side called on the Wagner Group of mercenaries to switch sides and join their ranks to avenge the deaths of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and their commander Dmitry Utkin.

Russian air authorities have said Prigozhin, Utkin and eight other people were on a private plane that crashed with no survivors north of Moscow on Wednesday.

“You are facing a serious choice now – you can stand in a stall of Russia’s defence ministry and serve as watchdogs for executors of your commanders or take revenge,” commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) Denis Kapustin said in a video address published late on Thursday.

“To take revenge you need to switch to Ukraine’s side,” the commander said.

The crash came two months to the day after Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries staged a mutiny against Russian military commanders in which they took control of a southern city, Rostov, and advanced towards Moscow before turning around 200 kilometres from the capital.

Russia has opened an investigation into the crash, but its outcome is unlikely to shake a widespread belief that Prigozhin was killed as an act of vengeance for staging the mutiny.

RVC commander Kapustin, a far-right Russian national, founded the armed group a year ago. RVC fights on the Ukrainian side and has said it was behind several military attacks on Russian border regions.

“Let’s end the bloody meat grinder of the special military operation,” Mr Kapustin said in his address to Wagner fighters using the Russian official name for the invasion of Ukraine.

“After that, we will march to Moscow and this time we will not stop 200km before the Moscow ring road but go to the end,” he said.

Russia UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council that Western countries were lying about alleged abductions of Ukrainian children, claiming that Russia was actually saving them.

Moscow says its programme of bringing children from Ukraine into Russian territory is to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.

“We urge Washington to stop cynical use of children matters to settle geopolitical scores,” the Russian embassy to the US said in a statement on Thursday commenting on new sanctions.

The US State Department on Thursday imposed sanctions on 13 people and entities it said are reportedly connected to the forced deportation and transfer of Ukraine’s children, as Washington ramps up pressure on Moscow over its invasion.

The United States is also taking steps to impose visa restrictions on three Russia-installed purported authorities over their involvement in human rights abuses of Ukrainian minors, the State Department said in a statement.

The sanctions coincided with Ukraine’s Independence Day.

“The United States will not stand by as Russia carries out these war crimes and crimes against humanity,” US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Thursday.

Ukraine’s government estimates that Russian authorities have deported and/or forcibly displaced over 19,500 children from their homes since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine on Thursday marked its second Independence Day since Russia’s full-scale invasion, with officials vowing to keep up their fight to drive out the Kremlin’s forces and local people remembering their fallen loved ones.

The national holiday coincided with the war’s 18-month milestone, giving a sombre mood to the commemorations.

“We remember everyone who gave their lives for freedom and independence, for the free future of Ukraine,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a social media post.

He said that an independent Ukraine is “what we are fighting for.”

In the northeastern Kharkiv region, families visited a cemetery where fallen Ukrainian soldiers are buried.

Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Vladimir Putin turned political consultant, said by carrying out the mutiny and remaining free, Yevgeny Prigozhin “shoved Putin’s face into the dirt front of the whole world.

”Failing to punish Prigozhin would have offered an “open invitation for all potential rebels and troublemakers,” so Putin had to act, Gallyamov said.

Videos shared by the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone showed a plane dropping like a stone from a large cloud of smoke, twisting wildly as it fell, one of its wings apparently missing.

A free fall like that typically occurs when an aircraft sustains severe damage. A frame-by-frame AP analysis of two videos was consistent with some sort of midflight explosion.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky shook off any responsibility from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane crash.

“We have nothing to do with this,” he said. “Everyone understands who does.”Soon after the plane went down, people on social media and news outlets began to report that it was a Wagner plane. Minutes after Russian state news agencies confirmed the crash, they cited the civil aviation authority as saying Prigozhin’s name was on the manifest.

Prigozhin was long outspoken and critical of how Russian generals were waging the war in Ukraine, where his mercenaries were some of the fiercest fighters for the Kremlin.

For a long time, Vladimir Putin appeared content to allow such infighting – and Prigozhin seemed to have unusual latitude to speak his mind.

But Prigozhin’s brief revolt raised the ante. His mercenaries swept through the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and captured the military headquarters there without firing a shot. They then drove to within about 200km (125 miles) of Moscow and downed several military aircraft, killing more than a dozen Russian pilots.

Mr Putin first denounced the rebellion as “treason” and a “stab in the back.” He vowed to punish its perpetrators, and the world waited for his next move, particularly since Prigozhin had publicly questioned the Russian leader’s justifications for the war in Ukraine.

Instead Mr Putin made a deal that saw an end to the mutiny in exchange for an amnesty for Prigozhin and his mercenaries and permission for them to move to Belarus.

Numerous opponents and critics of Vladimir Putin have been killed or gravely sickened in apparent assassination attempts, and US and other Western officials long expected the Russian leader to go after Prigozhin, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the 23-24 June mutiny.

“It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising,” said German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, while acknowledging that the facts were still unclear.

“We know this pattern — in Putin’s Russia — deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained,” she added.

Anastasia Bukharova, 27, said she was walking with her children on Wednesday when she saw the jet, “and then — boom! — it exploded in the sky”.

She said she was scared it would hit houses in her village of Kuzhenkino and ran with the children.

But the plane ended up crashing into a field.“Something sort of was torn from it in the air,” she added.

Sergei Mironov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party and former chairman of the upper house of the Russian parliament, said on his Telegram channel that Prigozhin had “messed with too many people in Russia, Ukraine and the West.”

“It now seems that at some point, his number of enemies reached a critical point,” Mr Mironov wrote.