Did the Kremlin kill Prigozhin?
Foreign politicians suspect Putin’s assassination order
08/24/2023 02:48 am
After the death of Wagner boss Prigozchin, foreign politicians from the FDP and CDU assume that Putin was murdered. At the same time, they see the Kremlin boss weakened and consider another uprising by the mercenary group to be possible.
Several German politicians have shown little surprise at the death of the head of the Russian Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. “It was to be assumed that Prigozhin would pay for his attack on Putin with his life,” said the chairwoman of the defense committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP), to the editorial network Germany and, with a view to Prigozhin, spoke of a “devil who getting involved with the devil”. But it also shows “that Putin and his henchmen in the Kremlin are obviously very nervous,” she added.
CDU foreign politician Roderich Kiesewetter suspects that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the death of the Wagner boss. “It was a matter of time,” he said on the program “RTL Direkt” in the evening. “The fact that things happened so quickly (…) and that ten more deaths were accepted shows the brutality of the Putin system,” he said. Kiesewetter stressed that the alleged murder of Prigozhin was also a “warning” for Germany. “We must be clear that this system does not negotiate (…) and only understands the language of strength.”
New rebellion of the Wagner mercenaries?
The CDU foreign politician and member of the Bundestag Norbert Röttgen sees President Putin weakened even after Prigozhin’s death. “Either Putin or Prigozhin – that was the situation even after the canceled putsch,” he told the editorial network Germany. “Whether the Wagner group beheaded by Putin will form a rebellion or will submit without a leader is an open question. But Putin’s power system has cracked and he can no longer stop it.”
Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in Russia that evening. According to the Russian aviation authority Rozaviatsiya, citing the airline, both Prigozhin and his deputy Dmitry Utkin were “on board the plane”. The Ministry of Disaster Prevention in Moscow announced that according to initial information, all ten occupants of the machine died. According to Rozawiatsiya, the flight “was carried out within the framework of a properly issued airspace permit”.