US President Joe Biden said this Wednesday that he was not surprised by the possible death of the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash in Russia.
“I still don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m not surprised. Little happens in Russia without Putin’s participation,” the head of the American state said in statements during his vacation on Lake Tahoe, located between Nevada and California.
The White House said Biden had been briefed about the crash of an executive plane in northern Moscow that killed 10 people and that Wagner, the leader of the mercenary group, was on the passenger list, according to Russian authorities.
The State Department and the White House National Security Council, which is responsible for foreign policy, have so far avoided expressing their position on the consequences of the incident.
However, White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson stressed via X (formerly Twitter) that Biden’s team saw publications in the “media” about what happened.
“If this is confirmed, no one should be surprised,” Watson said.
“The catastrophic war in Ukraine has led to the fact that the private army moved to Moscow and now – it seems – to this,” he added.
Russian emergency services have already recovered eight bodies from the scene, but the identities of the victims have not yet been confirmed, according to the official RIA Novosti news agency.
The plane reportedly crashed in the Tver region, more than 100 kilometers north of the Russian capital, where there are no airfields nearby.
The 62-year-old mercenary leader Wagner fought for the Russian regular army in Ukraine and two months ago became the protagonist of a failed military insurgency against the Russian military leadership in which he captured one of the most important cities in Ukraine. south of Russia, Rostov-on-Don.
Through the mediation of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to withdraw his mercenaries and move his base to the former Soviet republic.
Accusing him of treason, Russian President Vladimir Putin received him in the Kremlin, after which Prigozhin announced the resumption of the activities of the Wagner group in Africa.
Prigozhin appeared on Monday for the first time since the riots in a video in which he suggested he had returned to Africa to make Russia “even greater on every continent.”