The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 25th August 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 25th August 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
The disgraced head of the Wagner mercenary company dies in a plane crash north of Moscow. Russian troops hold the line in the south and push back in the north of the Donbas. The war in the air continues with wave after wave of Russian missile attacks on military targets throughout Ukraine whilst the Ukrainians respond with drone raids in Crimea and Moscow. And Vladimir Zelensky calls on Balkan leaders to help Ukraine open up a Danubian river “grain corridor” to by-pass Russia’s Black Sea blockade.
Zelensky was in Athens this week for an EU–Balkans summit called to discuss the region’s “European” future. Ukraine is not a Balkans country nor is it is a member of the European Union. He was, nevertheless, a welcome guest at the gathering in Greece whose only thing is common is that they are all satellites in one form or another of the USA.
They all dutifully pledged their support for the “integrity of Ukraine”, and Greece even offered to train Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16 jets that the Dutch and the Danes are giving to the puppet regime in Kiev.
These US warplanes are the latest “game-changers” in the NATO play-book, but whether they will turn the tables on the Russians remains to be seen.
The new NATO missiles failed to change the balance of forces on the front and the Challenger tanks that were supposed to smash through the Russian lines this summer are now just burnt-out hulks in no-man’s land.
Back in Moscow, the government has launched a criminal investigation into the death of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on Wednesday.
Prigozhin was flying from Moscow to St Petersburg with his business partner and their bodyguards when the plane went down some 300 km north of Moscow.
Although some bodies have yet to be recovered, all 10 passengers and crew are believed to be dead. The disgraced leader of Russia’s ‘foreign legion’ had only recently returned to Russia after going into voluntary exile in Belarus follow his abortive coup in June.
Eyewitnesses say the plane was hit by a missile. Others say they heard an explosion before the plane went down. Perhaps a bomb was planted in the landing gear area. The fact that the pilot said nothing suggests a sudden loss of consciousness due to de-pressurisation that would occur following a blast in the fuselage.
Some say it was Putin’s pay-back for his former protégé’s treachery. Others believe Prigozhin’s jet was sabotaged by the Ukrainians – blown up on the eve of Ukraine’s independence day as a ‘gift to Zelensky’ from Ukraine’s intelligence service. But Zelensky says “We had nothing to do with it. Everybody realises who has something to do with it”, whilst his master in Washington pointed the finger at Putin. “I don’t know for a fact what happened but I’m not surprised,” Joe Biden said. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
Some pundits even think the whole thing was staged by Prigozhin himself, using a body-double, to enable him to disappear into obscurity with his money.
The Wagner chief usually used two private jets, switching between them for security reasons so that no-one beyond a tiny circle would know which plane he would be on at any given time.
So now there’s speculation about the whereabouts of Artem Stepanov, one of Prigozhin’s personal pilots, who had access to the planes but wasn’t part of the crew for this final, fatal flight as he was on a hiking holiday in Siberia. The police are now looking out for him.
Whether it was sabotage or simply a tragic accident will, however, only be answered by the official investigation into the crash.