Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
By: The opinion Posted Aug 23, 2023, 16:34 pm EDT
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said he was not surprised by the crash of a plane this Wednesday in central Russia and whose passenger list included the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgueni Prigozhin.
“I have no concrete information about what has happened, but I’m not surprised“, Biden said in statements to the press, who also took the opportunity to mention the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, although he did not directly accuse him of the crashed plane.
“There is not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind, but I don’t have enough information to know the answer. I’ve been working out for the last hour and a half,” Biden added.
Before speaking to the press, the president, first lady Jill Biden, and members of their family took a Pilates class followed by a spinning class.
Biden and his family are this week enjoying a vacation on Lake Tahoe, located between Nevada and California.
Shortly before his public statements, the White House had reported that the president had been informed of what had happened.
In a similar tone, the spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, had previously positioned herself, who went to the social network X (formerly Twitter) to say that Biden’s team had seen the press articles about what happened. .
“If confirmed, no one should be surprised”stressed Watson, who quoted in his message on X another CNN publication in which it was indicated that Prigozhin appears on the passenger list of the Embraer private plane, which crashed in the Tver region, in central Russia.
The Russian emergency services have rescued eight bodies at the place where the device crashed, but for now their identity has not been confirmed, according to the official RIA Novosti news agency.
Prigozhin, 62, led a failed military rebellion against the Kremlin two months ago in which he came to take one of the most important cities in southern Russia, Rostov-on-Don.
After the mediation of the Belarusian president, Alexandr Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to withdraw his mercenaries and transfer his base to the territory of that former Soviet republic.
After accusing him of treason, Putin received him in the Kremlinafter which Prigozhin announced the restart of Wagner’s operations in Africa.
Precisely, Prigozhin appeared on Monday for the first time since the riot in a video, in which he suggested that he had returned to Africa to make Russia “even bigger on all continents.”
With information from Efe.
Keep reading:
– Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, died in a plane crash during a trip to St. Petersburg
– Some 16,000 borrowers in Washington are eligible for student debt forgiveness
– Members of Congress and Leaders Condemn Supreme Court Ruling Ending Student Loan Relief