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'Won't be a surprise if…': Ex US official on Wagner chief plane crash
A former special adviser to the US army said that it would "not be a surprise" if Vladimir Putin was behind the crash.
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is thought to have been on board a private jet that crashed in the Tver region, north of Moscow. Reports claim that all 10 people have been killed although there is no confirmation of Yevgeny Prigozhin's death. A former special adviser to the US army told Sky News that it would "not be a surprise" if Vladimir Putin was behind the crash.
It is not clear what has caused the accident.
"We should not forget that the disappearance or the removal of some of Putin's enemies over the years have been linked to suspect aircraft crashes," Mark Voyager said citing the death of General Lebed as an example.
Read more: Flashback: How Yevgeny Prigozhin led a shocking attempt to topple Putin
General Lebed- the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai- was killed in a Mi-8 helicopter crash in the Sayan Mountains in 2002. At the time, a member of the Russian parliament said the crash could have been caused by sabotage.
"He was running for president before that, and he was criticising the Chechen War which Putin had started," Mark Voyager explained, adding, it "would not be a surprise if Putin has yet again chosen a method that provides some plausible deniability" to take out one of his enemies.
The former US official said people should look out for how quickly Russia tries to take control of Prigozhin's fighting empire and financial assets.
"By the follow-up steps of the Kremlin and the Putin regime, we'll know to what extent they knew about this, and they were prepared," he said.
Read more: What we know about the crashed plane that had Prigozhin listed as a passenger
Prigozhin mounted a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in late June. The Kremlin then said that he would be exiled to Belarus along with some of his fighters. But the mercenary chief has since reportedly been seen in Russia.
