Russia-Ukraine updates: Prigozhin talented man who made ‘mistakes’ – Putin

Russian shelling of Kherson city has killed one person and left three injured, including a child, the regional governor said.

Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Friday morning that 16 Russian shells had hit the city, including a residential area.

“As a result of Russian aggression, one person died, three more were injured, one of them a child,” Prokudin wrote on the Telegram messaging app, according to a translation.

Critical infrastructure and a medical facility in Kherson city were also targets of the Russian attack, he said, without giving details of the extent of the damage.

Prokudin had said earlier that a seven-year-old girl was wounded in a Russian attack on her home in the Kherson region and had been rushed to hospital.

Prigozhin was confident that Putin would forgive him for mounting a mutiny in June that saw his Wagner fighters occupy a city in southern Russia and his forces shoot down several Russian aircraft, the Washington, DC-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said, citing Russian reports.

According to the ISW, Prigozhin had likely underestimated how personally humiliated Putin was by the Wagner mutiny and the threat by the mercenary force to take Moscow and throw out Russia’s top military commanders.

“Prigozhin had also apparently overestimated the value of his own loyalty to Putin. Putin places significant value on loyalty and has frequently rewarded loyal Russian officials and military commanders even when they have failed,” the ISW said in its latest assessment of events in Russia and Ukraine.

“Prigozhin’s rebellion was an act of significant insubordination despite his claim that he rebelled out of loyalty to Russia,” the think tank said.

There are some transgressions, the ISW said, that even Putin views as “too serious for loyalty to overcome”.

Russian state TV channels Russia 24 and Russia 1 largely stuck to describing the investigation into the plane crash that killed 10, with some only mentioning Prigozhin’s name at the end of their reports.

Russian channels also focused on Thursday on portraying Putin as calm and in control, with extensive coverage given over to Putin’s participation, via virtual link, at the summit of BRICS nations in South Africa, the Associated Press reported.

The closest Russian television seemed to get to addressing reports of the death of Prigozhin was during the television talk show 60 Minutes on Russia 1, which did not cover the plane crash but rather the West’s response to it.

Olga Skabeeva, one of Russia’s most prominent presenters and propagandists, introduced a piece with clipped-up “breaking news” headlines from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, implying the West was responding hysterically.

Another of Russia’s most famous television news anchors, Vladimir Solovyov, suggested Ukraine was behind the reported deaths of Prigozhin and some of his top associates.

There are no independent channels in Russia’s powerful state television network, which encompasses multiple stations across 11 time zones, and Putin has further suppressed dissent since invading Ukraine.

A Russian blogger was sentenced to eight years in prison after he was found guilty of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army.

Maxim Katz, who left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine last year, regularly criticises Russia’s role in the conflict on his YouTube channel, which has more than 1.8 million subscribers.

A court in Moscow ruled on Thursday that Katz, “under the guise of reliable reports”, was guilty of “publicly spreading false information” about the Russian army, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported. He was prosecuted in absentia.

According to the Rossiyskaya Gazeta government newspaper, the charge against Katz was related to a YouTube video from April 2022 where he allegedly accused Russia of deliberately attacking civilians in Ukraine.

Moscow has unleashed an unprecedented crackdown on political dissents since its invasion of Ukraine has faltered on the battlefield, jailing or fining dozens in Russia who oppose the conflict.

Thirteen people and entities in Russia have been sanctioned by the United States over their alleged involvement in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children.

Ukraine’s government estimates that Russian authorities have deported or forcibly displaced more than 19,500 children from their homes since Moscow’s invasion last year.

Among those sanctioned on Thursday was Artek, which the US state department said is a Russian government-owned “‘summer camp’ located in Russia-occupied Crimea”.

Artek receives Ukrainian children who are placed in “‘patriotic’ re-education programmes” and are prevented from returning to their families, the US said.

An adviser to the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, the commissioners for children’s rights in Russia’s Kaluga and Rostov regions, and the chairman of the government of the Chechen Republic were also among those sanctioned.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in March for Putin and Russia’s children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of a war crime for illegally deporting Ukraine’s children.

The United States’ top general Mark Milley said Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian forces was going slowly, had partial success and that it was too early to say it had failed.

Milley said Ukraine faced heavy Russian reinforcements with many months to prepare minefields, tank ditches and dragon’s teeth tank obstacles “in a very complex set of defensive preparations that the Ukrainians are fighting through”.

“The Ukrainians have a significant amount of combat power remaining; this is not over yet,” the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff told Jordan’s Al-Mamlaka public service TV news channel.

“So, I think it’s frankly too early to say whether it [has] succeeded or failed,” he said.

“It’s an offensive that is been going on for about, I guess, eight weeks or so. It’s very bloody, slow, high casualty-producing and it’s very difficult. So, the idea of militarily kicking out two- or three-hundred-thousand Russian troops is going to be very difficult and challenging,” he said.

“A different way of getting out of this is through negotiations and maybe that will happen, too.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said that a wave of 42 Ukrainian drones was shot down and disabled by electronic means over the Russian-annexed Crimea peninsula.

Nine Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs] were shot down, and 33 were suppressed by means of “electronic warfare” and did not reach their target, the defence ministry said on its Telegram messaging channel early on Friday.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of the Crimean city of Sevastopol, wrote earlier on Telegram that several drones were destroyed off the coast of the peninsula.

“Several UAVs were destroyed over the sea in the area of Cape Khersones,” Razvozhayev said.

Emergency services reported no damage to civilian infrastructure, he said.

Cape Khersones is located in the southwest of the Crimea peninsula near Sevastopol, which is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, has come under more intense and increased attacks by Ukraine in recent weeks.

US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have discussed the start of training for Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets, the White House said.

Biden and Zelenskyy also discussed expedited approval for other nations to transfer their F-16 fighter jets to Ukrainian forces, the White House said late on Thursday.

The US will start training Ukrainian pilots to fly US-made F-16 fighter jets beginning at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Arizona, in October, the Pentagon said earlier on Thursday.

Starting next month, Ukrainian pilots will undergo English language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to bring their fluency up to the level needed to operate the military aircraft, officials said.

Russian air defences prevented a Ukrainian missile attack in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, the Russian Defence Ministry said.

The early morning attack on Friday was aimed at “civilian targets on the territory of the Russian Federation”, the defence ministry wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

“The missile was detected and destroyed by air defence systems over the territory of Kaluga region,” the ministry said, without providing details on the “civilian targets” it accused Ukraine of attempting to attack.

Kaluga borders the Moscow region, which has recently been the focus of almost daily raids by Ukrainian combat drones.

Moscow’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports suspended flights earlier on Friday, the state-run TASS news agency reported, citing aviation authorities who did not specify why the suspension was necessary.

Russians who fight for Ukraine have called on Wagner mercenaries to switch sides and join their ranks to avenge the reported plane crash deaths of Prigozhin and Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin.

“You are facing a serious choice now. You can stand in a stall of Russia’s defence ministry and serve as watchdogs for executors of your commanders or take revenge,” the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) Denis Kapustin said in a video address late on Thursday.

“To take revenge, you need to switch to Ukraine’s side,” the commander said, according to the Reuters news agency.

“Let’s end the bloody meat grinder of the special military operation,” Kapustin said in his address, using the official Russian term for the invasion of Ukraine.

“After that, we will march to Moscow, and this time, we will not stop 200 kilometres before the Moscow ring road, but go to the end,” he said.

Kapustin, a far-right Russian nationalist, founded the armed group a year ago and is believed to have carried out several attacks on Russian border regions.

Residents of Kuzhenkino, the village near the crash site, reported hearing a bang before the jet, on which Prigozhin was reported to be a passenger, crashed to the ground.

One villager interviewed by the Reuters news agency near the crash site said: “It wasn’t thunder, it was a metallic bang – let’s put it that way.”

Russian news aggregator Baza, which is known to have sources among Russia’s law enforcement agencies, reports that investigators were focusing on a theory that one or two bombs may have been planted on board the plane.

The executive jet had shown no sign of a problem until a precipitous drop in its final 30 seconds, according to flight-tracking data.

A preliminary US intelligence assessment concludes that an intentional explosion caused the plane crash that is presumed to have killed Prigozhin, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reports.

Two officials who described the initial US assessment said it determined that Prigozhin was “very likely” the target and that the explosion falls in line with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics”.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the AP, did not offer any details on what caused the blast.

The day before Prigozhin’s plane crash, Russia’s Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov visited Libya to reassure allies there that fighters from the Wagner mercenary force would remain in the country – but under Moscow’s command.

Meeting in Benghazi, Yevkurov told eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar that Wagner fighters would report to a new commander, a Libyan official with knowledge of the meeting told the Reuters news agency.

There was no indication the timing of the Libya visit was anything but coincidental.

But, the visit “suggests that – if anything – the Russian footprint in Libya might deepen and expand rather than shrink”, said Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya researcher at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank.

Despite the reported death of Prigozhin, Moscow has every interest in continuing his mercenary activities in Africa, analysts say.

Russia has been outsourcing activities in Africa to Wagner since 2014, and analysts say the Kremlin has no interest in ending that now.

With or without Wagner, “Russia wants to keep its business and security interests in Africa,” said Rama Yade, Africa director of the US think tank Atlantic Council.

“It is a primary goal,” Yade told the AFP news agency.

Peter Rough, an analyst at the Hudson Institute think tank based in Washington, DC, also said the Kremlin has no intention of losing Wagner’s “positions in Africa”.

“But the transfer of those operations from Prigozhin to a successor will be a delicate matter,” Rough said.

Moscow’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports have suspended flights, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency has reported.

Earlier on Friday morning, residents of the Russian regions of Tula and Kaluga posted on social media that explosions were heard overnight, Russian online media outlet Baza reported.

Flights were also briefly disrupted at Moscow’s airports on Tuesday and Wednesday during Ukrainian drone attacks.

The likely death of Prigozhin has resulted in discussions over the future of the Wagner Group in countries across Africa, where the group has played a central role in expanding Russian influence.

“The Wagner Group is present in a number of African countries from Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso. But the face of that organisation, up until now, has been Yevgeny Prigozhin,” Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque reported from Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

“He was very much the face of Russia on the African continent, in some places overshadowing Vladimir Putin. And with his death, there’s uncertainty with those countries that have relationships with the Wagner Group.”

As media outlets around the world buzz with speculation about Prigozhin’s likely death in a plane crash, Russian state media has taken a more understated approach.

The Associated Press reports that state media channels Russia 24 and Russia 1 have focused their coverage on the crash investigation, making only passing references to Prigozhin’s ill-fated mutiny effort against Russia’s military leadership in June.

State media has also sought to project a calm image of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as he attends a summit of BRICS nations in South Africa.

By contrast, everyday Russians have thrown themselves into discussions about the crash online, where rumours have proliferated that Prigozhin’s death was an assassination.

Ukrainians have gathered in the centre of Kyiv to mark their independence day, watching a brief parade of battered Russian tanks more than a year and a half after Russia’s invasion turned life in the country upside down.

Many shared stories of pain and sacrifice as the conflict grinds on with no end in sight.

“As a soldier, I feel the pain of losing so many of our guys,” soldier Pavlo Nechytailo told Al Jazeera.

“I’m grateful to our warriors and heroes, which include my husband, who has not returned from captivity,” said Anna Pavilichenko.

Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb told Al Jazeera that Putin has emerged more “powerful” after the likely death of Prigozhin.

But, Korb warned, Prigozhin’s mercenary organisation, the Wagner Group, could present an enduring threat to the Russian president.

“I think [they are] dangerous in the sense that they could become a renegade force,” he said.

Korb explained that, previously, Prigozhin helped keep the Wagner Group aligned with Putin’s priorities.

“He [Prigozhin] was very loyal to Putin. In fact, in Putin’s statement today, he said their relationship goes back to the 1990s. And so, he was able to make sure that Wagner supported Putin’s policies.”

Questions abound as to how the apparent death of Prigozhin might affect different parts of the world where his mercenary organisation, the Wagner Group, operated.

Political analyst Karam Shaar speculated his absence might be felt most keenly in Syria, where Wagner played a key role in Russia’s bid to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The group participated in ground operations in Syria and inserted itself into economic enterprises such as mining and oil and gas. It also recruited Syrians to take part in operations in foreign countries.

“Relative to other countries, I think their role in Syria has proven more pivotal because they were involved in direct clash on the ground,” Shaar told Al Jazeera. “However, their role recently, at least militarily, has waned.”