Embraer

Lockheed Martin gör nu en sista säljspurt för att ”Super Hercules” ska bli valet framför brasilianska Embraer när Sveriges ålderstigna Herculesplan byts ut. ”Om regeringen väljer C-130J kommer det att gynna svensk industri, inklusive Saab”, försäkrar krigsmaterieltillverkarens säljansvarige Tony Frese Di.

I åratal använde Wagnergruppens ledare Jevgenij Prigozjin privata flygplan för att inte kunna spåras. Till slut verkar det vara precis det som blev hans död, skriver Wall Street Journal. Tidningen har talat med ryska flygvapenofficerare, Wagneravhoppare, tjänstemän från Afrika och Mellanöstern och andra som med insyn i Prigozjins resmönster för att kunna kartlägga hans flygresor – ända fram till den sista. Hans plan lyfte ofta från en flygplats utanför Moskva för möten i Syrien, Libyen eller flygresor tvärs över Sahara. Besättningen stängde ofta av transpondern, hade med sig falska pass och hörde av sig till flygledningskontrollerna mitt under flygningar för att meddela att destinationen ändrats. Mercenary leader moved around Russia, blocked surveillance and eluded sanctions until assassination in plane crash By Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Jack Gillum and Benoit Faucon 30 august, 2023 Long before his private jet plunged from the sky, Yevgeny Prigozhin suspected it could be the stage for his assassination. The Embraer Legacy 600 was one of several private jets the chief of the Wagner mercenary firm outfitted with equipment to detect surveillance, electronically tinted smart windows and white leather seats. Aboard, Prigozhin sought to evade a growing dragnet of sanctions and wanted lists, according to former Russian air force officers, Wagner defectors, African and Middle Eastern officials and other people familiar with his travel routine. His jets, often setting off from Moscow’s Chkalovsky Air Force Base or nearby civilian airports to visit clients in Syria, Libya or across the Sahara, would regularly turn off their transponders, vanishing from plane tracking screens. Crews, known to carry fake passports, would revise passenger lists just before takeoff, then radio air-traffic control midflight to announce a sudden change of destination. From his time as a youth on the same tough St. Petersburg streets as Vladimir Putin, through his stints in prison and role as Russia’s most influential war entrepreneur, until finally becoming the only member of Putin’s inner circle to challenge him, Prigozhin spent a lifetime honing his ability to live on the run. It wasn’t enough to save him. The 62-year-old military entrepreneur’s jet came down in a patch of meadow about 40 miles from Putin’s lakeside residence on Aug. 23, killing all on board. U.S. officials have assessed that the plane crashed as the result of an assassination plot. The Russian government has said it is investigating the cause of the crash but hasn’t offered an explanation. It bulldozed the site, despite international safety norms that call for preserving it. In the years before the crash, Prigozhin and his crew put in place elaborate measures to mask his flight plans, testing the limits of how easily an international fugitive could jet through dozens of foreign airports undetected. To track Prigozhin’s movements, The Wall Street Journal reviewed flight records provided by Flightradar24, an aircraft-tracking service, since at least 2020. The U.S., which along with some 30 other countries sanctioned the warlord and his companies in recent years, had offered a $10 million reward for his capture and leaned on African partners including Niger to block his plane from landing or being serviced crossing the Sahara.  The Treasury Department barred U.S. citizens and companies from servicing or engaging with his planes and yachts after his social media troll farm churned out thousands of fake accounts that spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 presidential election. In April, a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft appeared to follow one of his Wagner group airlifters about 70 miles off the coast of Syria and Lebanon, according to flight data from ADSB Exchange, another tracker. The mainstay of his fleet, the roughly $10 million Embraer Legacy 600, had changed its registration and jurisdiction several times since a Seychelles-based company linked to Prigozhin acquired it in 2018 from a firm registered in the British tax haven of Isle of Man, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. Prigozhin would sometimes shuffle between two or three different jets for a single one-way journey to the African countries where Wagner has contracts to protect leaders and national military juntas. Before landing he would question his crew on how closely ground staff would interact with the aircraft. He frequently conducted meetings in disguise or on runways in his jet in case he was threatened with capture and had to make a swift exit. Last October, Prigozhin landed at an air base in eastern Libya to meet Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar, dressed in a military uniform, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard and flanked by a security detail. Gleb Irisov, a former Russian air force officer, said he regularly bumped into Prigozhin at the Chkalovsky air base, boarding flights to Africa surrounded by bodyguards. Prigozhin stepped up security measures further after his aborted June mutiny, in which he threatened to march his mercenary army to Moscow. When flying inside Russia, he stopped flying out of the Moscow air base or other Russian military airstrips, and also stopped using government jets from the Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Management, according to people familiar with the situation. He set out on his final Africa tour in August from a sleepy commercial airport 20 miles southeast of the capital, adding himself to the passenger list shortly before takeoff. Russia’s state-controlled press is full of speculation about the cause of the crash, which also killed Wagner deputy Dmitry Utkin and other close associates. Speaking to the nation after the explosion, Putin called Prigozhin an old friend from the 1990s who “made some serious mistakes in life.” Social media channels considered close to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, suggested Prigozhin’s security protocols had weakened in the months before the flight. Other channels have pointed to uncorroborated testimony of aircrew who cited unusual repairs ahead of the final flight or the visit of two men who said they were prospective buyers of the jet, hours before the crash. “Prigozhin travels a lot so there’s your opportunity” to have him killed, said Dan Hoffman, former CIA station chief in Moscow. He likened Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin to a scene in “The Godfather” when Michael Corleone tells the traitor Carlo Rizzi he will be exiled to Las Vegas, only to have him murdered minutes later. Prigozhin had once counted himself among the few loyalists in the shrinking circle of hard-liners around the autocrat. After the failed mutiny, the Putin-Prigozhin relationship became murkier. In a speech several days after, Putin revealed his government had financed most of Wagner’s operating expenses, after years denying the government funding. Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, claimed to have persuaded Putin not to move ahead with a preset plan to execute Prigozhin. Wagner was invited to decamp to Belarus, and Prigozhin arrived at an airfield outside Minsk in the Embraer Legacy 600 as the country was constructing 300 tents for his fighters. On Aug. 1, that tent city began to vanish from satellite pictures, as authorities apparently dismantled it. After that, Prigozhin began to reappear in videos and voice memos, promising to expand Wagner’s footprint in Africa. He offered mercenaries to the military regime that in July seized power in Niger.A few days before his death, he used a Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-76 jet to fly from Central African Republic to Mali, where he posed with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.” On the way, he avoided the airspace of Nigeria, whose government has been unsettled by Russia’s support for military governments in West Africa. The jet that crashed was present at pivotal moments in Wagner’s international expansion. In Sudan, just days after 2019 street protests toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir, it landed in Khartoum carrying high-ranking Russian military officials, according to Sudanese officials. The delegation, including Igor Osipov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, met with the governing military council to discuss how Russian private military assistance could help them face down swelling nationwide protests. A week later, the jet traveled the same route from Moscow carrying senior Sudanese officials including Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces, an infamous paramilitary group accused of war crimes in the restive Darfur province. The commander, who goes by the mononym Hemedti, became Prigozhin’s key partner in Sudan, supplying him gold taken from mines the paramilitary group was able to expand and secure with equipment and arms provided by Wagner. Prigozhin was present at several key meetings in Khartoum around that time but often traveled under a pseudonym, according to Sudanese officials who saw him at the Republican Palace and were briefed on the meetings. The Embraer Legacy 600 jet was beginning to attract the attention of Russian journalists and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which added the jet and Autolex, the registered Seychelles owner, to sanctions in September 2019. Shortly after, Prigozhin deregistered it and re-registered it to a St. Petersburg company, Trans Logistik. Now registered as RA-02795, the jet was used to fly leaders of the Central African Republic in June 2021 from St. Petersburg, where they attended the international economic forum, to their capital city Bangui. U.S. officials, which had begun tracking the plane, asked African allies to monitor it and enforce sanctions. The government of Niger agreed to block Prigozhin’s planes from its airspace, jeopardizing his ability to fly across the vast Saharan desert.Within days of his June mutiny, Prigozhin was back on the Embraer Legacy 600, shuttling between a military air base in Belarus, Moscow and St. Petersburg. At the end of July, he flew to St. Petersburg to try to network on the margins of a Russia-Africa summit hosted by Putin that he wasn’t allowed to officially attend. Back in Russia after the final trip to Africa, he again took off in his Embraer Legacy 600 jet from Moscow bound for St. Petersburg on Aug. 23. The plane vanished from flight-tracking websites. U.S. officials, monitoring for signs of a surface-to-air missile, saw none, and concluded the explosion was caused by some alternative form of sabotage, such as an onboard bomb. Flightradar24 reported Prigozhin’s plane falling rapidly from about 28,000 feet before it stopped transmitting. On Tuesday, the warlord was buried in a short and sparsely attended service in his hometown’s Porokhovskoye cemetery. In an undated video statement that circulated on Russian social media in recent days, Prigozhin used eerily prescient language to describe what he thought was happening to the Russian state. “You better kill me, but I won’t lie,” he says. “I have to be honest: Russia is on the brink of disaster. If these cogs are not adjusted today, the plane will fall apart in midair.” Nicholas Bariyo and Kate Vtorygina contributed to this article.

Wagnerledaren Jevgenij Prigoszjin levde ett liv på flykt med olika maskeringar och avtal som endast ingicks med en handskakning. Hans sista dagar kantades av resor runt i Afrika och Mellanöstern för att visa att han fortfarande hade kontroll, skriver Wall Street Journal. Det han inte visste var att det blev hans avskedsturné. Den senaste resan utomlands började i Bangui i Centralafrikanska republiken, dagen efter mötte han Rapid Support Forces i Sudan och tog emot guld från Songominan i Darfur. – Jag behöver mer guld, sa Prigoszjin enligt en sudanesisk tjänsteman. On the run, the paramilitary chief crisscrossed his global business empire, stopping in Central African Republic and Mali, desperate to show he was still in control; ‘I need more gold.’ By Benoit Faucon 24 August 2023 Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future. Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent. In the riverside presidential palace in Bangui, the capital, Prigozhin told President Faustin-Archange Touadera that his aborted June mutiny in Russia wouldn’t stop him from bringing new fighters and investments to his business partners in Central Africa, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Shortly after, a Wagner helicopter landed nearby carrying five commanders from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group reliant on the mercenary group to wage war against their country’s government. The delegation had traveled to Bangui from the restive Darfur province bearing a gift for Prigozhin, who had provided them surface-to-air missiles: gold bars from the mines his mercenaries helped secure in Sudan’s war-torn west. On the other side of the Sahara, Prigozhin’s rivals in Russia’s defense ministry were delivering a competing message to Wagner’s clients in Libya. The Kremlin was taking formal control of a sprawling corporate network whose ambitions had outgrown President Vladimir Putin’s comfort. The delegation was led by deputy defense minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov—the man whom Prigozhin publicly berated and rebuked for using the informal “you” to address him when Wagner captured the Southern Military District HQ in Rostov, Ukraine, on June 24. Prigozhin flew back to Russia around the same time, stopping over in Mali, and weaving through the airspace of client states he was trying to salvage from Kremlin control. It was a farewell tour that the 62-year-old paramilitary chief didn’t realize he was making. When the Embraer Legacy 600 jet carrying Prigozhin and his most senior lieutenants fell from the sky on Wednesday just 40 miles from one of Putin’s lakeside residences, it cut short an international contest that had been quietly playing out for two months as both the Kremlin and the self-styled military oligarch vied for influence in the countries that once sourced their mercenaries from Wagner. For years, Prigozhin had been increasingly living on the run, changing between wigs to impersonate bearded Arab military officers while refueling his jet in the dwindling number of airports that would grant him permission to land. His Wagner group and the hundred-some shell companies it was linked to were mostly known for their mercenary operations, but by the end of his life had also expanded into finance, construction, supply and logistics, mining and natural resources—and even a thoroughbred racing firm, Sporthorses Management, controlled by his daughter, Polina. Its income derived from exports of Sudanese gold to Russia, and diamonds and wood from the Central African Republic to United Arab Emirates and China, Western and African officials said. His death leaves the future of those businesses uncertain. The Kremlin now seeks to nationalize an opaque network centralized around Prigozhin’s personal authority. On Thursday, Putin expressed his condolences for those who died on the doomed jet, calling Prigozhin someone with a “complicated life story,” who had greatly contributed to the Russian cause. “He made some serious mistakes in life,” Putin said of the man he once awarded the country’s highest military honor, the medal of the Hero of Russia. “As far as I know, he returned from Africa only yesterday.” “Different factions linked to the Russian military will probably try to take over these lucrative business contracts and create new proxy forces,” said David Lewis, from the U.K.’s Exeter University. “Prigozhin was particularly skilled at managing these transnational networks, but he is not indispensable.” Countries from Mali to Syria had come to depend on Prigozhin’s hired guns, and just days ago, he was offering his services to the new military government of Niger, which seized power last month. Yet new mercenary companies, run by Russia’s GRU military-intelligence agency, were competing to take over Wagner’s contracts. Putin had personally told Touadera, the Central African Republic president, that the time had come to distance himself from Prigozhin. When Touadera visited Prigozhin’s hometown of St. Petersburg for a conference last month, he abstained from taking a selfie with the Russian warlord. For his part, the sardonic ex-convict shrugged off the possibility of his impending demise. “We will all go to hell,” Prigozhin said in an undated video, released Wednesday by the Grey Zone Telegram channel, which frequently publishes official Wagner statements. “But in hell, we will be the best.” This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen African government, military and intelligence officials, Wagner defectors, activist groups and reviews of encrypted conversations and flight data, as well as corporate organizational charts reviewed by the Journal. Prigozhin’s flights between Russia and Africa were confirmed by Gleb Irisov, a former Russia air force officer who spoke to airport crew. Much of Prigozhin’s dealings were shrouded in scores of heavily sanctioned shell companies that banked in opaque jurisdictions. It was a veil of obfuscation that helped the Kremlin claim deniability as the Wagner group helped Russia amass influence, fan protests in Africa against pro-Western governments and swerve around sanctions. Many of the deals he struck with foreign governments were conducted on a handshake basis, with the details unknown beyond a tiny circle of Wagner officials handpicked by Prigozhin. One was Dmitry Utkin, the former GRU officer whose Nazi tattoos can be seen in photographs, who also died in Wednesday’s plane crash. His thousands of workers, mercenaries, line cooks, mining geologists and social-media trolls were often paid in cash, at times from a plastic bag by Prigozhin himself—who in turn often billed governments by sending his private jets to collect his arrears in cash. Since June, the Kremlin had been trying to assert control over that shadowy web of murky arrangements. The Defense Ministry—led by Prigozhin’s chief rival, Sergei Shoigu—had been dispatching delegations to inform foreign governments that they would henceforth do business directly with the Russian state. After the mutiny, Prigozhin struck a deal with Putin and moved his forces in Russia to seek shelter in Belarus. But Prigozhin refused to retire quietly, crisscrossing the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa in a bid to keep his business links alive. He posted audio messages, offering mercenaries to the military regime that had recently taken power in Niger, and a video of himself in Mali posing with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.” The warlord, who was sanctioned by more than 30 governments, was accustomed to living on the run. He flew in planes that regularly turned their transponders off and avoided airspace where Western-allied governments could claim a $10 million State Department reward for information on the man alleged to be responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He had been forced to make at least one emergency landing in the middle of the Sahara after running out of fuel and frequently conducted meetings on runways in his jet in case he had to make a swift exit. He traveled on fake passports and dispatched advance parties of Wagner cybersecurity experts to sweep for bugs. He preferred to brief social media followers over audio messages—impossible to geolocate—or through videos in locations that were difficult to identify. Last October, Prigozhin arrived at an air base in eastern Libya to meet the Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar. Prigozhin dressed in a military uniform with oversize epaulets and peaked cap, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard. He was surrounded by a retinue of six heavily armed henchmen, and locals thought he was a follower of the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement. “Everyone who saw him thought he was Salafist,” said a Libyan who witnessed his arrival. Photos from the meeting, reviewed by people present, show Prigozhin smiling through his beard. Shortly after it was taken, he shouted at Haftar through a translator, demanding some $200 million for Wagner’s help securing the Libyan warlord’s territory, including its oil wells. Prigozhin later sent another private jet the next month to pick up the cash. Prigozhin was convinced Haftar’s regime was infiltrated by French intelligence and the CIA. Even the Libyan uniform he would wear on trips to Libya was made in Syria and brought from there—ensuring no bugs or tracking devices could be inserted. This year, his attempted Russian mutiny left him with enemies on his own side. Putin seemed resolved to kill Prigozhin during the hours when his convoy of disgruntled mercenaries approached Moscow, the autocratic ruler Alexander Lukashenko of neighboring Belarus later recalled. Lukashenko claimed he had phoned the Russian president and talked him out of that decision, offering Belarus instead as a place where Wagner could find safety. Prigozhin arrived in a private jet three days later. “Having betrayed their country and their people, the leaders of this mutiny also betrayed those whom they drew into their crime,” Putin said in a speech that month, glaring into a camera. “They lied to them, pushed them to their death, putting them under attack, forcing them to shoot their people.” The Kremlin began asserting control over the business network Prigozhin had founded. Agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, raided Wagner’s glass office tower headquarters in St. Petersburg for evidence against Prigozhin; across town, Russian law enforcement seized computers and servers at his Patriot Media Group, the social media troll factory blamed for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. Pro-Wagner social media channels were blocked within Russia, and some of his subsidiaries were raided by Russian security services, which claimed to have found pistols, fake passports and the equivalent of $48 million in cash and gold bars in his properties. Prigozhin still hoped to salvage the mercenary outposts he had built in Africa and the Middle East. A new detachment of Wagner mercenaries was set to rotate into Central African Republic to secure the country ahead of an August referendum that would allow the president to serve without term limits. Another contingent was in place, training the local defense forces. The new deployments also expanded the mercenaries’ foothold along the border with Congo, to protect from a cross-border rebel attack, say Western security officials. “We are not drawing down, and more than that, we are ready to go further and increase our various contingents,” Prigozhin told Cameroon-based Afrique Media in a July interview. “For the moment all our obligations are fulfilled, and they will be, no matter what comes our way.” At the end of that month, five weeks after his rebellion, he set out to network with African leaders at St. Petersburg’s Trezzini Palace hotel, one of the accommodations for a Russia-Africa summit attended by 17 African heads of state and Putin. They included Touadera, the Central African Republic president whose government credited Wagner with saving the country after years of armed rebellion. Touadera, told by Putin to avoid Prigozhin, sidestepped the warlord. Prigozhin managed to meet up with Touadera’s chief of protocol, then headed to meet a Cameroonian journalist. None of the African leaders attending was seen with Prigozhin. Instead, the African presidents were ushered into a gilded Kremlin conference room, across from Putin and a man Prigozhin was coming to see as a rival: Gen. Andrey Averyanov, the head of GRU’s covert offensive operations unit. Viktor Bout—the arms dealer who once supplied weapons to warlords in Liberia, recently returned to Russia from a U.S. prison in an exchange for U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner—also appeared on a panel, while Prigozhin languished outside. Prigozhin had become concerned that his operations in Africa were being shifted to the GRU, Russian Telegram channel VchK-OGPU, known for leaks from FSB, reported. The same week as the summit, the presidential guard in Niger kidnapped their pro-American president Mohamed Bazoum, and installed themselves as the country’s new military leadership. Prigozhin released a voice memo offering to send mercenaries to help shore up the junta. His allies in Mali also met with the new Nigerien leadership. So far, Niger appears to have passed on the offer, West African and U.S. officials have said. Crowds of young men—some waving Russian flags and pro-Putin placards—however, have marched through the capital, demanding Niger break from the West. Neighboring Nigeria, worried about a band of Russian-backed military governments expanding across West and Central Africa, has threatened to use military force to reverse the coup. Prigozhin’s death “doesn’t change anything,” a Nigerian intelligence official said. “Russia is still there. When the Wagner leader is gone, they are still active in Africa…Maybe now the Kremlin’s hands will be more strengthened.” Prigozhin’s last trip began in Bangui, where Touadera and his intelligence chief Wanzet Linguissara agreed to meet him in the Presidential Palace, a whitewashed riverside complex. A spokesman for Touadera didn’t respond to a request for comment. Linguissara declined to comment. A spokesman for the Officers Union, a corps of Russian military instructors in Bangui that backs Prigozhin, said it had “no precise information on whether he was in Bangui.” At the meeting, Prigozhin said Wagner would reinforce its presence to ensure security and facilitate new investments in agriculture, according to a person briefed on the meeting. The following day, Prigozhin was welcoming the Rapid Support Forces commanders from Sudan. As they handed over the gold, packed in wooden crates from Darfur’s Songo mine, the warlord said he needed more. “I need more gold,” Prigozhin said, according to a Sudanese official familiar with the conversation. Wagner supplies had helped the paramilitary group score a series of battlefield victories against Sudan’s Islamist military government, including the recent capture of a weapons factory and the largest police base in Khartoum. “I am going to make sure you defeat them,” he added. Leaving Bangui, Prigozhin flew to Bamako, Mali, based on flight records of a private jet he frequently used to crisscross the continent, posing in front of local army pickups in a video, before heading back to Moscow. On Tuesday, a delegation from the Russian Defense Ministry landed in Libya at the invitation of Haftar, the Libyan warlord who had paid Wagner for securing its oil wells and territory. Prigozhin’s mutiny had left Haftar’s close circle nervous about Wagner’s presence in Libya, said Mohamed Eljarh, a managing director at security consulting firm Libya Desk with connections in Haftar’s camp. “They felt that if they do it in Russia, they can do it in Benghazi,” said Eljarh, who said the two sides discussed a formal defense partnership with the Russian government. Russian intelligence officers would now be stationed in Benghazi, and the head of the Russian contractors will be replaced with a new mercenary firm set up in Wagner’s place. But the same fighters would remain. Haftar asked for spare parts, maintenance and training for its aging aircraft fleet and even requested that Russia help supply it with Iranian drones it is using in Ukraine. “Russia wanted to send the message that it’s now a partnership between two armies,” a Libyan security official said, as a state-to-state relationship. “Putin told me Libya is very important for us,” Yevkurov told Haftar. “It’s the first Wagner country we are visiting.” —Gabriele Steinhauser contributed to this article.

På kvällen den 23 augusti kraschade ett privatflygplan av typen Embraer Legacy på väg från Moskva till S:t Petersburg. Den ryska luftfartsmyndigheten meddelade att tio personer omkommit, bland dem Wagnergruppens ledare Jevgenij Prigozjin.

På kvällen den 23 augusti kraschade ett privatflygplan av typen Embraer Legacy på väg från Moskva till S:t Petersburg. Flygplanet befann sig i luften omkring 30 minuter innan det störtade, och fattade eld när det slog i marken.

Den ryska luftfartsmyndigheten Rosaviatsia meddelade att tio personer, bland dem Wagnergruppens ledare Jevgenij Prigozjin och dess grundare Dmitrij Utkin, stod på passagerarlistan. Några timmar senare sade Rosaviatsia att Prigozjin varit ombord. Ryska myndigheter är dock ökända för att följa regimens linje, oavsett vilka fakta som egentligen finns. Inga oberoende instanser har hittills kunnat verifiera uppgifterna.

Obekräftad bild

En Wagnerkopplad kanal på meddelandetjänsten Telegram lade under onsdagskvällen ut en bild på något som brinner på ett fält och påstår att det är det kraschade flygplanet. Döda kroppar syns intill vrakdelarna. Bildleverantören AFP har dock inte kunnat bekräfta att det verkligen är det aktuella flygplansvraket.

På videofilmer syns hur ett plan, som påstås vara det där Prigozjin fanns ombord, okontrollerat störtar mot marken.

Den oberoende ryska nyhetssajten Meduza skriver att allt tyder på att kraschen föregåtts av en explosion. Det finns argument för både att planet skjutits ned och att det kan ha rört sig om en explosion inne i planet.

Det som talar för att planet skjutits ned är att ögonvittnen talar om två explosioner. Att skjuta två gånger mot samma mål är praxis för att öka chanserna att träffa målet, enligt Meduza.

På de videofilmer, som sägs komma från platsen där planet kraschade, syns spår på vrakdelarna som skulle kunna komma från en luftvärnsrobot. Bildkvaliteten är dock så dålig att det är svårt att bedöma exakt.

Enligt Flightradar24 befann sig planet på en höjd av 8,5 kilometer när det kraschade. Långt ifrån alla luftvärnssystem kan skjuta ner ett flygplan på sådan höjd utan då krävs minst en medeldistansluftvärnsrobot som bör placeras geografiskt nära målet. Ett så kraftfullt vapen skulle dock orsaka mycket allvarligare skador på planet än vad som syns på bilderna från platsen. Det tyder snarare på en explosion inuti planet, enligt Meduzas bedömning.

Bilden som påstås vara tagen vid olycksplatsen. Dagen före kraschen hade Prigozjin för första gången sedan kuppförsöket i midsommarhelgen visat sig i ett videoklipp. Där står den 62-årige Wagnerledaren i ett ökenområde, iförd kamouflageklädsel med en automatkarbin i händerna. Han pratade om insatser i Afrika, och intrycket som gavs var att han skulle befinna sig där.

"Inte förvånad"

Så exakt vad som orsakade kraschen är alltså inte känt. Oavsett hur det gick till så utgår många bedömare och experter från att den ryska regimen och president Vladimir Putin ligger bakom.

President Vladimir Putin sände på torsdagen sina kondoleanser efter kallade han kraschen för en "tragedi".

— Jag kände Prigozjin väldigt länge, sedan början av 1990-talet. Han var en komplicerad man och gjorde allvarliga misstag i sitt liv men uppnådde de rätta resultaten.

Enligt den ryska luftfartsmyndigheten Rosaviatsia och utredningsmyndigheten Sledkom ska kraschen utredas. På torsdagen uppgav en rysk källa för tankesmedjan ISW att det är sannolikt att kraschen kommer att förklaras med att ett terrordåd skett ombord, en förklaring som redan har börjat föras fram i Ryssland.

På kvällen den 23 augusti kraschade ett privatflygplan av typen Embraer Legacy på väg från Moskva till S:t Petersburg. Flygplanet befann sig i luften omkring 30 minuter innan det störtade, och fattade eld när det slog i marken.

Den ryska luftfartsmyndigheten Rosaviatsia meddelade att tio personer, bland dem Wagnergruppens ledare Jevgenij Prigozjin och dess grundare Dmitrij Utkin, stod på passagerarlistan. Några timmar senare bekräftade också Rosaviatsia att Prigozjin varit ombord.  Ryska myndigheter är dock ökända för att följa regimens linje, oavsett vilka fakta som egentligen finns. Inga oberoende instanser har kunnat verifiera uppgifterna.

Obekräftad bild från Wagnerkopplad kanal

En Wagnerkopplad kanal på meddelandetjänsten Telegram lade under torsdagskvällen ut en bild på något som brinner på ett fält och sägs vara det kraschade flygplanet. Döda kroppar syns intill vrakdelarna. Bildleverantören AFP har dock inte kunnat bekräfta att det verkligen är det aktuella flygplansvraket.

Bilden som påstås vara tagen vid olycksplatsen. Dagen före kraschen hade Prigozjin för första gången sedan kuppförsöket i midsommarhelgen visat sig i ett videoklipp. Där står den 62-årige Wagnerledaren i ett ökenområde, iförd kamouflageklädsel med en automatkarbin i händerna. Han pratade om insatser i Afrika, och intrycket som gavs var att han skulle befinna sig där.

Joe Biden: "Inte förvånad"

Exakt vad som orsakade kraschen är inte känt. Många bedömare och experter utgår från att den ryska regimen och president Vladimir Putin ligger bakom.

— Jag vet inte exakt vad som har hänt, men jag är inte förvånad, säger USA:s president Joe Biden. Överstelöjtnant Huovinen: "Kreml glömmer aldrig"

Även överstelöjtnant Johan Huovinen, militärstrateg på Försvarshögskolan i Stockholm, pekar på en lång rad av personer som utmanat Putin och Kreml, och sedan dödats.

— Utmanar man Kreml, vilket Prigozjin gjorde, så finns det oftast bara en väg för de här människorna. Kreml glömmer aldrig något sådant.

President Vladimir Putin har fram till torsdagsmorgonen inte kommenterat kraschen.

Tio personer uppges ha omkommit när ett privatplan störtade på onsdagskvällen. Det uppger den ryska luftfartsmyndigheten, enligt statliga nyhetsbyrån Tass. ”Det fanns tio personer ombord, däribland tre besättningsmän. Enligt preliminära uppgifter är alla ombord döda”, skriver myndigheten på Telegram enligt TT. Privatflygplanet var av typen Embraer Legacy, som var på väg från Moskva till S:t Petersburg när det kraschade nära byn Kuzjenkino i Tverregionen. En stund senare kom uppgifter om att Wagnerchefen Jevgenij Prigozjin ska ha varit med på passagerarlistan.

Ytterligare nio personer ska ha omkommit i kraschen.

"Ett privatflygplan av typen Embraer Legacy på väg från Moskva till S:t Petersburg kraschade nära byn Kuzjenkino i Tverregionen. Det fanns tio personer ombord, däribland tre besättningsmän. Enligt preliminära uppgifter är alla ombord döda", skriver myndigheterna på Telegram.

Den brasilianska flygplanstillverkaren Embraer tillkännagav i dag att det kommer bygga en ny fabrik i Sao Paolo för tillverkning av ”flygande taxis”, skriver AFP. Enligt planerna ska fordonen, som är en korsning mellan drönare och helikoptrar, lanseras till 2026. Tanken är att de ska transportera upp till sex passagerare i tätbebyggda områden med stora trafikproblem. Embraer uppgav på en pressträff att det redan fått beställningar på närmare 3 000 fordon, detta till ett värde på över 15 miljarder kronor. Intresset för de kommande fordonen är stort, skriver New York Times. Flera konkurrenter arbetar på liknande produkter och amerikanska myndigheter arbetar nu på att ta fram riktlinjer om hur det nya trafikslaget ska användas.

Belarus diktator Lukasjneko säger själv att hans förhandlande under Wagnerupproret förhindrade att ”slaviskt blod” spilldes. Men något tack kan han knappast vänta sig, skriver Der Spiegel. – Belarus är det sista hörn där det imperium Putin drömmer om faktiskt fungerar, säger journalisten Jakub Biernat till tidningen. Alexander Lukashenko managed to shine as a mediator in Putin's conflict with the Wagner Group. That triumph, though, should not obscure the fact that the Belarusian ruler is nothing more than a vassal of Moscow. By Jan Puhl 4 July, 2023 The Embraer Legacy 600 is a private jet for dignified business trips. And mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is also a fan of the aircraft. His plane, call sign RA-02795, touched down at the Machulishchy air base near Minsk at 7:40 a.m. local time a week ago Tuesday. The fact that Prigozhin was even allowed to escape to Belarus with his life was part of a deal brokered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko after the Wagner rebellion over the weekend of June 24. In doing so, he claimed proudly, he prevented the spilling of "Slavic blood." Belarusian media outlets proudly crowed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had spoken to Lukashenko on the phone three times that weekend. "I'll be quite honest with you – at first, I didn't pay much attention to all of this," he said during an address to military officials and other dignitaries at his palace long after it was all over. The Russian president, he said, called him on Saturday morning. "I advised Putin not to rush into anything," Lukashenko continued, sounding a bit as though he wasn't an autocrat dependent on Moscow's grace and speaking to one of the most powerful men in the world, but a wise father counselling his hot-tempered son in an attempt to prevent a temper tantrum. Lukashenko said Putin complained to him that Prigozhin wasn't even answering his calls and that there was no point in talking to him. "OK, just wait. I will try to contact Prigozhin," Lukashenko claims to have replied. In his version of events, it sounds like he practically single-handedly prevented the situation from escalating into full-scale combat. Lukashenko, of all people, is claiming to have played a decisive role in finding a temporary solution to the power struggle between Putin and Prigozhin. Indeed, it sounds almost as though the Belorussian leader, dismissed for years as a mere vassal of the Kremlin, is trying to profit from the chaos in neighboring Russia. Is he seeking to break free of Russia's tight embrace? Is Lukashenko the ultimate beneficiary of the mutiny? It seems unlikely that he had as much influence on the negotiations between Putin and Prigozhin as he is claiming. The actual consultations themselves were reportedly led by an acolyte of the Russian president. Lukashenko, by virtue of his office as head of state, at best upgraded the conversation in terms of protocol, according to reports. Prigozhin, after all, doesn't speak to just anyone – there has to be a president involved, even if he is Putin's vassal. Lukashenko has been in power in Belarus for 29 years. With his Soviet nostalgia and his planned economy prescriptions, the West initially regarded him as a post-communist oddity. But it was clear early on: He's a man who is willing to trudge over dead bodies to secure his rule. Since then, his regime has become ever more repressive, his population increasingly desperate. On top of that, his economy has collapsed and his dependence on Russia has grown – all because he has no other partner in Europe. He destroyed his international reputation when he rigged elections and cracked down on the opposition. When Putin recently announced that he was even planning on moving nuclear missiles to Belarus, it was certainly not meant as a boost to Lukashenko's lapdog status. Although the Belarusian pretends to have a say in when these weapons are used, the truth is that the launch codes are in the hands of Putin and his generals. William Alberque of the International Institute for Strategic Studies has described it as a "slow motion annexation" of Belarus. Increasingly, Lukashenko is becoming a mere figurehead for Putin: He might have a fancy title, but he doesn't really have any power. Lukashenko's former culture minister Pavel Latushka, who now lives in Warsaw and is a member of the political opposition in exile, says: "He is nothing more than a vassal of Moscow. His glory after the Prigozhin deal lasted only three minutes – a sham triumph." How long this triumph will really last, and whether it could be the beginning of an attempt at emancipation or the exact opposite, remains to be seen. Indeed, it is still unclear what Belarus can expect from mutineer Prigozhin, a guest who could still cause major problems for Lukashenko in his country. Latushka estimates that as many as 8,000 Wagner Group fighters may ultimately follow Prigozhin to Belarus. Most of them are former prisoners. This large number of fighters, many of them coarsened by the war, is an extreme security risk and is unlikely to do anything to improve Lukashenko's reputation, which is already rock bottom among the population. Belarusian political scientist Valery Karbalevich believes that Lukashenko is certainly garnering significant satisfaction from his current ability to pose as Putin's savior. But: "Lukashenko has absolute no use for a military unit that he doesn't control." Indeed, if Wagner troops were to use Lukashenko's country as a jumping off point for a future attack on Ukraine, Lukashenko would find himself drawn even deeper into the war. Thus far, it has seemed that he has wanted to avoid such a fate. The few polls that are available provide a clear picture: The majority of Belarusians bear no grudge against their neighbors, and it is unlikely that they are buying into the Russian propaganda about the supposedly fascist government in Kyiv. If Lukashenko weren't such a brutal dictator, it would almost be a tragic story of how he is desperately trying to break free from Russia's grip. For years, he rode a seesaw course between Moscow and Brussels: He offered a slight opening now and then, a little less repression, a few critical jabs in the direction of Moscow – and seemed to be interested in better relations with the West in return. But the European Union was never convinced. Over the years, sanctions from Brussels grew harsher, step by step. Lukashenko experienced one last triumphant moment in 2014 and 2015. He invited leaders from Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France to his swanky palace in Minsk for conciliation talks. But the agreements reached during those negotiations, Minsk I and II, never really settled the conflict in the Donbas region. And once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, they became worthless. Today, Belarus resembles a black hole in the middle of Europe. Very little information leaks out, and even Belarusian exile broadcaster Belsat in Warsaw is able to report very little from the country. The opposition estimates the number of political prisoners in the country at around 2,000. Fear paralyzes Belarusians; even months later, one can be held accountable for online postings that run astray of the regime. Any kind of dissenting opinion can be considered "terrorism" or "inciting public disorder" and can be punished with draconian measures. The regime's oppression reached one of its peaks in May 2021. That's when Belarusian jets forced a Ryanair vacation plane to land in Minsk. On board were opposition blogger Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend. Both were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms – and recently given sudden pardons. Protashevich had stopped making critical comments after a temporary release. "The message is clear," says Ale ś Zarembiuk , who heads the Belarusian House in Warsaw, a cultural center of Belarusians in exile. "Lukashenko is saying: I'll get you wherever you are – but if you keep quiet, you'll have a chance at mercy. I am the source of justice." In Soviet style, Lukashenko is trying to get inflation under control and has simply banned price increases. Nonetheless, economists are estimating currency devaluation at around 15 percent. In 2022 alone, gross domestic product fell by almost 5 percent, the country's worst economic crisis since the 1990s. Belarus is only surviving because because Russia is supplying gas and goods. But not everyone in the country is starving: Lukashenko isn't an absolute ruler. He relies primarily on the security apparatus, military officials, intelligence services and police. They're paid above-average wages or given preference, for example, when looking for housing. To that end, the dictator has cultivated a group of loyal oligarchs whom he supplies with state contracts. In return, one built Lukashenko a villa in the pristine forests near the Polish border with a helipad and a man-made lake for swimming. Another set up a private clinic for Lukashenko's family with state-of-the-art medical technology. At least this is how a dissident who fled to Poland describes the system surrounding the dictator. He calls the security apparatus "highly corrupt." "There are about 1,000 people who are above the law," the dissident says, asking that he not be quoted by name. Even Poland, a European Union member state, doesn't feel safe from Lukashenko's grasp. "It is economic hardship and fear that has atomized our society. No one trusts anyone anymore." Recently, Lukashenko got an invite from Moscow to the celebrations commemorating the victory in World War II. He obviously wasn't well – he seemed waxy and absent, and was driven around in an electric car. After that, he wasn't seen in public for several days. Lukashenko is 68, overweight, and obviously doesn't pay much attention to his health. During the pandemic, he recommended vodka, sauna sessions and tractor rides to combat the coronavirus. Many observers wonder if the regime would collapse with Lukashenko's death. But experts like the Polish journalist Jakub Biernat don't believe that will happen. He says there are too many people in the country who benefit from the existing system. The people within the security apparatus could never allow an opening, because then they would possibly have to reckon with being prosecuted themselves. Most importantly, Biernat says, Russia would never allow its western outpost to become more democratic. "Belarus is the last corner where the Russian empire Putin dreams of is still functioning. And it is a model for what Ukraine will face if it loses the war: repression and dependency." It's possible that one of Lukashenko's sons would succeed him as president. The eldest, Viktor, is already on international sanctions lists for human rights violations; the second, Dmitry, is deeply connected to the system as an entrepreneur; and the youngest, Nikolai, was allowed to appear at his father's side in a tailored Soviet-style uniform as a child. A succession to the throne along dynastic lines, as in North Korea, for example, wouldn't surprise anyone in Minsk. Lukashenko, too, acknowledged in passing just how fragile his rule is. In his speech last Tuesday, he said: "If Russia collapses, we will be lying under the rubble and we will all die." © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.