MOSCOW, Russia
The head of Russia's feared Wagner private army suggested Sunday that four Russian military aircraft that reportedly crashed in a region that borders Ukraine may have been shot down by Russia's own forces.
Russian officials have not
commented on reports in Russian conventional and social media that two fighter
planes — an Su-34 and an Su-35 — and two military Mi-8 helicopters crashed in
the Bryansk region on Saturday.
State news agency Tass cited
unspecified emergency services sources as saying the Su-34 and one helicopter
crashed. Other sources, including Vladimir Rogov, the head of a Russian
collaborationist organization in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia province, claimed four
aircraft went down.
All of them reportedly
belonged to the same military air group.
During the war, cross-border
shelling has repeatedly hit Bryansk, which abuts Ukraine's Chernihiv and Sumy
provinces. Authorities there claimed that unexplained explosions also derailed
two freight trains and that an armed group penetrated the region from Ukraine
in March and killed two civilians.
A spokesman for Ukraine's air
force, Yuriy Ihnat, denied Sunday that Ukraine was involved in downing the
aircraft. In remarks on Ukrainian television, he suggested that Russia itself
could be responsible, but he later walked back the remark, saying it was an
attempt at joking.
However, Wagner head Yevgeny
Prigozhin (pictured) offered a similar hypothesis.
Four planes, — if you draw a
circle in the places of their fall, it turns out that this circle has a
diameter (and all of them lie exactly in a circle) of 40 kilometers (25 miles).
... Now go on the Internet and see what kind of air defense weapon could be in
the center of this circle, and then build your own versions,” Prigozhin said on
Telegram.
Prigozhin, whose forces are in
the thick of a grinding monthslong battle for the city of Bakhmut, clarified
that he was not “in the know” about the situation. But he has repeatedly
criticized the Russian military for its strategy in Ukraine and for allegedly
failing to supply Wagner with the ammunition it needs in Bakhmut.
No comments:
Post a Comment