Today Friday August 25, the Kremlin has come out in defense of Vladimir Putinpresident of Russia, unanimously considered by the independent press and the opposition the main suspect after the plane crash of the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgueni Prigozhin. “It’s all a lie”said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, in his first telematic press conference after a hiatus of almost three weeks.

Nevertheless, the Russian president had already broken his silence the day before conveying his condolences for the ten deceased in the air disaster and praising the figure of Prighozindespite having accused him of treason just two months ago, when he rose up against the Kremlin.

Peskov accused the West – which supports Ukraine in the war with Russia – of engaging in speculation and presenting the facts from “a certain angle.” And when addressing this issue, “you have to base yourself on facts,” Peskov said, while acknowledging that for the moment, “there are not many,” because there is an investigation underway. And as he assured, the investigation will conclude “in the not too distant future.”

For his part, he tried to lend a hand Alexandre Lukashenko, the President of Belarus: “I can’t say who did it. I’m not going to act as a lawyer even for my older brother. But I know Putin. That’s why I can’t imagine that Putin did it or that he is guilty.” He also stressed that “(Putin) is a calculating person, very calm and even slow when it comes to making decisions on less complex issues”, and stressed that, in case it is confirmed that it was a murder, the work had been “unprofessional and exceedingly crude”.

On the other hand, official US sources informed the Wall Street Journal that the catastrophe was, in fact, an assassination, but not with a surface-to-air missile (something that the Pentagon has also ruled out) but rather sabotage with a bomb placed in The aircraft. The president of United States, Joe Biden also acknowledged that he had not been surprised by the news, and made his opinion of the main suspect clear. “There’s not much going on in Russia that Putin isn’t behind,” Biden said.

Although the great concern of the West is what will happen now with the Wagner group, which for weeks has been instructing Belarusian military units near the border with Poland and which has also resumed its operations in the Sahel, in Africa. The spokesman of the Ukrainian Border Service, Andri Demechenko, assured on television today that the number of Wagnerite mercenaries in Belarus has not stopped decreasing in the last 48 hours. In this regard, Lukashenko assured that “Wagner is alive and will live in Belarus as much as some do not want it“. He played down satellite images showing the shrinking Wagner camp in the Mogilev region and insisted that the “core” of the group will remain in Belarus. “In a few days, they will all be here, about 10,000 people.” , he stressed when pointing out that currently some Wagnerites “are on vacation.”

Almost all the independent media and Russian opposition they point in only one direction: only the Kremlin could have been behind Prigozhin’s death. The investigator of the Bellingcat information website, Christo Grozev, opined that the catastrophe was, in fact, a special operation of the Russian military intelligence (GRU), which would have assumed control of the activities on the African continent. Along the same lines, the imprisoned opposition leader, Alexei Navalni, spoke of an “attack organized by Putin” and warned of a future civil war in Russia.

The expert Alexander Baunov wrote in the Carnegie Politika project that Putin has adopted the typical practices of mafia states and Stalinist terror, and recalls that no senior official has publicly accused Ukraine and the West of the accident. “After all, Joseph Stalin, whom more and more people have respect and even admiration for, was famous for the same cruelty towards his enemies as towards his supporters,” Baunov said. That is also the view of tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who criticized Prigozhin for missing an opportunity to oust Putin during last June’s failed armed rebellion. Only some media suggest the possibility that the plane was accidentally shot down by a missile launched by one of the anti-aircraft batteries that protect one of the presidential residences, Valdai, in the vicinity of which the Embraer plane in which Prigozhin was flying crashed.