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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The apparent assassination of the Wagner chief marks just another turn in Putin’s effort to shore himself up, but it won’t change the disastrous trajectory of the Ukrainian war.
Reports that Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has been killed in a plane crash immediately raised suspicions that he had been assassinated by the Kremlin.
The private plane apparently carrying him was flying between Moscow and St Petersburg when it crashed to the ground in flames; 10 bodies have reportedly been recovered from the wreckage by Russian authorities.
While there have been rumblings of discontent this week from Western allies about the progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the Ukrainian military is still making gradual but meaningful advances on the ground.
As the country marked its independence day, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that a “special operation” had been successfully carried out on the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, with Russian losses of personnel and an advanced missile system.
“Whatever happens in Moscow in terms of consolidating Putin inside the country, it doesn’t really solve the inevitable loss that he faces outside of Russia – with this proviso: if he can hang on until 2024 and Donald Trump wins the US presidential election, everything changes.”
The original article contains 784 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“The Russians have a lot of form here,” he says. “Throughout Soviet and post-Soviet history there have been suspicious air crashes when rivals were a threat or became too popular. For example, Yuri Gagarin in 1968 and General Alexander Lebed (a one-time possible contender for the presidency) in 2002 both died in mysterious circumstances in air incidents.”
Prighozin, sure; he’d expressed all kinds of disapproval of government policy and had just attempted to send his forces against Moscow, had disregarded Putin’s order to stop, had been investigated, various patrons and supporters have disappeared in the past two months, his organization was disbanded, many predictions were made from reputable people that he would be killed, and he was flying in a (relatively safe) passenger plane with other top Wagner associates between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
It looks like Gagarin died when doing MiG training under non-ideal conditions, and Lebed’s helicopter crashed into power lines. I don’t think that those are remotely near being in the same bin.