broader perspective looking at this power struggle that we re clearly seeing between putin, prigozhin, the wagner elements. all of those things become a key element in what we have to analyze here, why this happened and then also if in fact prigozhin is on board this aircraft and if his second in command is on board, then you get into a situation where the de dec dec dec decimation of the wagner group. as the u.s. assess this, the u.s. has tremendous ability to watch the planet for any missile launch anywhere. it can detect the burn as the missile is launch. it s how they determined that a
wagner plane, but according to the russians, according to tass, prigozhin was on the first one and that a number of bodies, not prigozhin s body, but a number of bodies have been recovered, including one of the wagner s top leaders, a second in command under prigozhin. although, in wagner, there really was never a true second in command. this was really a prigozhin outfit, a prigozhin cult. there were other enablers, powerful figures, and one of them apparently was killed. can i interrupt you right there, because if i can, richard. because clint watts was saying earlier he would find it very unusual that the two of them would be on the same plane. i don t know how much you know about how they traveled or whether they often traveled into different planes, whether that makes sense to you, but what can you tell us based on your experience and your coverage of the wagner group about that?
reporter: obviously it would not be a good idea. if you re planning a presidential trip, you wouldn t put your key leaders, the secret service would never do anything like that on one plane. spread it out, spread out the risk, but prigozhin was such a unique individual, a strange character, he took enormous personal risks. he went to the battlefields, in ukraine himself. there were video of him near bakhmut, not in the trenches but close to the front lines, putting himself clearly in harm s way, so his cavalier attitude towards security, i think, has to also be taken into account. could he have been on the same plane with the second in command? very likely, based on his personality, although that wouldn t have been a smart move. in terms of the reaction in russia, so many are afraid to react. we re not discussing an open society where they can fwo out
despite the fact that obviously that was very brutal. but i ve been in contact with folks from wagner and they took great pride in their performance on the battlefield inside ukraine. so a lot of that was shattered by that and certainly you could tell that yevgeny prigozhin was also a figure who had become a lot weaker than he was before. once again, i also think one. things that we really have to look out for was if yevgeny prigozhin was on the plane but if his second in command was on the plane as well. all the things we have seen from the wagner private military company in the past eight years, inside syria, i saw them in syria years ago when they were starting to operate there. and later in ukraine as well. he was behind a lot of that and that would certainly indicate a complete decapitation of the entire wagner military company and an uncertain future. decapitation is the word. that would make sense if putin had questions about those
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