Where were you when you heard that Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aircraft had crashed and he was presumed dead? For Ukraine watchers it was something of a surreal JFK moment. And, like the Zapruder tape, the video footage of the Russian mercenary group commander’s Embraer Legacy 600 private jet falling out of the sky is hard to forget.
Within minutes of the visuals emerging, journalists and other commentators were scrambling to reach conclusions: was it a bomb on board? Had the aircraft been shot from the sky? The Wagner Group boss had been travelling with colleagues from Moscow to St Petersburg: had he met with Vladimir Putin? Had they buried the hatchet over his aborted “mutiny” in June? Wasn’t he supposed to be with his troops in Belarus? What about that video of him in Africa just days before? So many questions.
