it s notable that the most recent video of prigozhin alive appeared to be from the african continent, where he was ready to expand operations there. wagner has been making a play to get involved in niger, the country that had a coup. the group is roundly condemned for human rights abuses in the operations on the continent, including, as nik was reporting there, excuses and wholesale attacks on groups. that included civilians. the u.k. parliamentary investigation group said it was a significant failure of the u.k. and one can expand that to other countries, of not paying enough attention to wagner s operations on the continent and the impact it s had. kim? if it has had the big impact and its role looked to be expapded as you say, what now might this mean for wagner in africa? i think it s an open
russian operations in africa, which was selling dictator ship in a box to african dictators. theoretically, not superficially, as a commercial deal from the wagner corporation, but actually furthering the kremlin s geopolitical interests. we saw it with the infamous factor, the disinformation operations, run out of s st. petersburg from an anonymous office block. and the people hired from the so-called internet research agency. and that was actually also part of prigozhin s empire, doing the kremlin s bidding. these blurred categories when you don t know where anybody is and what they re doing, exemplifies the prigozhin resume. and having played his card unwisely or rashly, this is actually the way the russian system works. finally, we have pictures from russian media showing people bringing flowers and
wing. it did a nose dive. it was gliding. i was afraid it would fall into the village. reporter: so, all of that will be have to be pieced together by the experts to try to understand what happens. we cannot fully trust the russian aviation authorities to conduct an impartial investigation here. in terms of piecing together clues, we re going to look at the clues we get from awe the kremlin responds to this. they ve not come out and commented on it yet. i think really important was on the same day as this crash, we got news from state media that a general who commanded the operation in ukraine, then disappeared after the wagner mutiny, known to have relatively close ties to evgeni prigozhin. he was removed from his position as the head of the aerospace forces. he hasn t been seen in public. evgeni prigozhin launched this mutiny in june, claiming he wanted the head of the armed
to david mckenzie in johannesburg. take us through wagner s role in some african countries. long before wagner became a worldwide name because of its involved in the ukraine war, the military group was working across the african continent and the middle east. if you look at the map, these are the areas in the past where wagner has been operating. now, the opterations have been direct military involvement, such as mozambique and in central african republic and in the west african country of mali. but they also have been involved critically in so-called psy-ops. in trying to persuade citizens and leaders to shift their allegiance away from the west, towards russia. this is something that cnn has reported over the years.
support the operations across the world. if the leadership structure collapses now, that could have a significant impact in the short term on wagner s operation. and in the long term, on those countries security status. kim? thank you so much. dave mckenzie in johannesburg. this just in to cnn. a maoscow court has extended th pretrial of evan gershkovich s detainment. he is facing up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges which he and his employer deknow. u.s. considers him wrongfully de detained. he was the first detained since the cold war. as donald trump plans his surrender to fulton county authorities later today, three of his top election lawyers have surrendered in an atlanta jail. have a look. this was the elite strike force,