Will the company be able to work in Africa and Ukraine without the previous management
The Wagner group was decapitated after the founder of this company, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, and its military commander Dmitry Utkin were killed in a plane crash on August 23. The Embraer Legacy 600 business jet (EBM-135BJ), on which they were flying with five escorts and three crew members, crashed in the sky over the Tver Region on the way from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
The fact that Prigozhin and Utkin were on the passenger list of the crashed plane on the day of the disaster was unusually promptly reported by the Federal Air Transport Agency. On August 27, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, which launched a criminal investigation into the accident, confirmed that the identities of all 10 victims were established based on the results of molecular genetic examinations. "They correspond to the list stated in the flight list," the ministry said. According to TASS, the founder of Wagner was buried at the Porokhovsky Cemetery in St. Petersburg on August 29.
Rosaviation also announced the beginning of an investigation into the incident with Prigozhin's plane. She began collecting factual materials about the training of the crew, the technical condition of the aircraft, the meteorological situation on the flight route, the work of dispatching services and ground radio equipment.
However, the very next day after the disaster, information about the last minutes of the Legacy 600 flight was presented by the flight tracking service Flightradar24. The latest data received from the aircraft was recorded at 18.20 Moscow time. 30 seconds before that, he began to lose altitude. The age of this aircraft was 16 years. Its owner in the Flightradar24 database is the Wagner group.
Russian Telegram channels published videos and photos from the crash site near the village of Kuzhenkino, which show how the plane partially collapsed in the air, entered a flat spin, fell to the ground and caught fire. The tail section of the business jet was found a few kilometers from the main crash site.
The reason why the private plane crashed is still unknown, an investigation is underway. Prigozhin's associates immediately announced the work of the Russian air defense, then a version about an explosion on board the plane appeared. On August 24, TASS quoted the words of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky that Kiev had nothing to do with the crash of Prigozhin's plane.
The death of the leaders of Wagner leaves questions about the future fate of the group itself. After the March of Justice on Moscow, which became a watershed for the company, two months before the deaths of Prigozhin and Utkin, the attitude of the authorities to Wagner changed dramatically several times.
In an address to the nation on June 24, when Wagner's forces had already captured Rostov-on-Don and were advancing towards Moscow, President Vladimir Putin called the Wagnerian march an armed rebellion, betrayal and treason. However, after the authorities managed to stop the march through negotiations mediated by the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, the attitude towards Prigozhin and Wagner softened.
On August 24, Putin expressed his condolences to the families of those killed in the plane crash in the Tver region. He called Prigozhin a talented businessman and a man of difficult fate, who made mistakes, but was able to achieve results, including at the request of the president. Putin also noted the Wagnerians' contribution to the special military operation in Ukraine and Prigozhin's work in Africa.
Anyway, after the mutiny, the activities of the PMCs in Russia were stopped. Answering questions on August 25, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov said that such a structure as the Wagner PMCs does not exist de jure.
According to the terms of the agreements with the authorities, the Wagnerians handed over all heavy military equipment to the Russian Defense Ministry. The company's personnel were offered a choice: to transfer to contract service in the Armed Forces of Russia, or relocate to Belarus.
At first it seemed that the group would be given the opportunity to continue working outside Russia in Syria and in Africa, where its units have recently operated in the Central African Republic and Mali. It is from Africa that Yevgeny Prigozhin is believed to have recorded his last video message, which was published on August 21. In it, he stated that his group continues to fulfill the tasks that were set and for which it "made promises that it would cope."
But on the eve of Prigozhin's death, a delegation of the Russian Defense Ministry headed by Deputy Minister Colonel-General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov arrived in Libya, where the Wagner Private Security Company also operated earlier. According to a number of media reports, this is due to the plans of the Ministry of Defense to replace the Wagnerians on the continent on their own. Obviously, after the death of the leadership of the PMCs, it will be easier to do this.
As one of the Wagner commanders reported on July 19 in a Telegram channel close to the PMCs, 78 thousand fighters of the company took part in the fighting in Ukraine. At the time of the capture of Bakhmut on May 20, the group lost 22 thousand fighters killed, another 40 thousand were injured. Of the remaining 25 thousand people in the ranks, 15 thousand . they went on vacation, the rest went to Belarus.
According to the Financial Times, the Russian authorities allowed Prigozhin to withdraw to Africa some of the fighters who did not want to relocate to Belarus. About a thousand people were ready to go there, 500 of them had already arrived in the CAR.
In the meantime, Wagner can feel relatively calm only in Belarus. The fighters who arrived in the republic are stationed in a camp near Osipovichi in the Mogilev region. The local Ministry of Defense noted that the servicemen of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Belarus, together with the soldiers of the PMCs, practiced performing combat training tasks at the Brest training ground near the Belarusian-Polish border. As Alexander Lukashenko recently confirmed, the core of the company is now located on the territory of this country, but up to 10 thousand people can gather within a few days. "Wagner has lived, is alive and will live in Belarus," Lukashenko said.
It is obvious that for Lukashenka, the reputation of "Wagner" is an additional argument for pressure on Poland and Lithuania, which caused a backlash. "We demanded from the authorities in Minsk that the Wagner group immediately leave the territory of Belarus," Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said after a meeting with partners from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia on August 28.