On Wednesday, August 23, at 6 p.m., Yevgeny Prigozhin boarded his plane together with the staff of the Wagner Group; They went from Moscow to St. Half an hour after takeoff, already at cruising altitude, the Embraer Legacy 600 broke into pieces in a town called Kuzhenkino. No one really knows what happened: only the list of seven passengers and three crew members is known and that there are no survivors. It is assumed that they are the ones on the list and that they have confirmed it with what little is left of them, scattered among the charred remains of Embraer, but this can be made up because today nothing is true and nothing is a lie. Russian Federation.

On the list was Prigozhin’s deputy Dmitri Utkin, Mr. Wagner, the one who gave his name to the largest private army in history and who is responsible for a Russian organization being named after a German musician and writer. Richard Wagner was a Saxon composer from the 19th century, the author of famous operas such as Tannhäuser, Ring of the Nibelung or Tristan and Isolde. He was a great musician, but also an anti-Semite of those who in their works promoted German nationalism and the arrogance that led to Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Wagner was the war name of Utkin, a skinhead who tattooed the insignia of the Waffen SS in the same place where they fell on the black uniforms of Hitler’s elite forces and the Praetorian Guard.

After leading the lion’s share of the war effort in the invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin turns against Putin because of the lack of support from the Russian military and faces two generals who are more friends at the dinner table than on the battlefield. On June 23, Wagner’s group occupied the city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced towards Moscow with the intention, it is not clear, whether to finish off Putin or teach him a lesson on how to progress in an offensive war.

Power is like that: it fools people into believing they are all-powerful, even after they’ve lost it.

Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian tyrant, had to intervene to stop the Wagners before all hell broke loose in Moscow. He offered the Wagners asylum in his country, where they set up camp. The relationship between Prigozhin and Putin, who were once friends and a well-watered table, ended, but one fine day Prigozhin left Belarus and introduced himself as Pancho in his home in his imposing offices in St. Petersburg. Two days before the fatal flight, he released a video, allegedly filmed in Africa, of Wagner making well-paid revolutions for various Sahelian dictators. And on Wednesday that unusual flight…

Strange because if Prigozhin himself would never have boarded a plane in Moscow two months after the uprising against Putin; and if he had been Prigozhin’s lieutenant, he would never have agreed to fly with him between Moscow and Petrograd.

Power is like that: it fools people into believing they are all-powerful, even after they’ve lost it. We think we’re geniuses because we got ahead at work and decided we’d make a big deal if we went it alone. And when we became independent, things went wrong because we never realized that our power was borrowed. It’s the Prigogine syndrome. (OR)