Prigozhin Dead in a Plane Crash — How Russian, How Putin – The American Spectator

According to reports coming in from Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner Group, who just weeks ago dramatically challenged Vladimir Putin, threatening to march to the Kremlin to remove the Russian leader, is dead in a plane crash just outside of Moscow.

“Prigozhin was listed among the passengers, according to the Federal Air Transport Agency,” states TASS, the former Soviet news agency. “An investigation into the crash of the Embraer aircraft has been launched, the department noted.”

Yes, I’m sure. An investigation. I bet it will be very thorough — eh, comrade?

Planes crash every day, you see. They especially do so when they carry passengers hated by Vladimir Putin.

To this day, I have Polish friends convinced that it was no accident when a plane carrying effectively the government of Poland went down in April 2010 en route to Smolensk to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the brutal Soviet killing of over 20,000 Polish military officers in the infamous Katyn Woods massacre. The nearly 100 victims included the president and first lady of Poland, Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria, plus numerous Polish high-level government and military officials, over a dozen members of the nation’s parliament, several priests, and elderly victims of the Katyn massacre.

Mad Dog Putin surely didn’t like that little commemoration the Poles had planned that April. Did the Russkies rig that one? I certainly can’t confirm that they did, but nearly every Pole and his mother and father and brother and sister immediately suspected the Kremlin.

If you think that Putin’s hands are clean in this death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, then I have a thousand acres of sunny beachfront property in Siberia to sell to you, really cheap.

Only an idiot, or a thoroughly indoctrinated weird American Putinist, could think that Vladimir Putin had nothing to do with this plane crash killing Prigozhin. This kind of thuggery is standard fare for a KGB-trained ogre like Putin.

I’m reminded at this moment, as I am often with all things Russian and Putin, of the sage expression of my late, great friend and mentor William P. Clark, who was President Ronald Reagan’s most crucial adviser in the effort to defeat Putin’s buddies who ran the Evil Empire. I was Clark’s biographer. We talked constantly, if not daily, for years. Clark and I would often shake our heads at the latest hardball antics of the Russkies, whether it had been the Sovs shooting out of the sky a Korean commercial airliner on September 1, 1983 (Clark was national security adviser when that happened), killing 269 innocents flying from New York City to Seoul, or a shirtless Putin posing with a rifle while shooting at a rhinoceros. Clark would sigh and say simply, “How Russian, Paul. How Russian.”

Yes, how Russian.

Once again, I find myself saying the same as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane goes down, killing him and whatever other poor souls happened to be on that plane with him.

How Russian. And how Putin.