Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in a probable assassination last week on board his Embraer private jet, held a similar belief. One of his fighters’ tactics to punish deserters was to tape their heads to a block of concrete and then bludgeon them to death with a sledgehammer. The hammer became their symbol.

For years, Prigozhin did the Kremlin’s dirty work and sought to spread Russian influence and sow discord among its enemies around the globe. Putin offered Prigozhin some praise after his death, calling him a “talented businessman” who had made a “significant contribution” to the war against Ukraine.

But, Andrew Roth wrote this week, Prigozhin’s legacy inside Russia will come down to whether the former Putin ally will bear the mark of a traitor, a word that Putin used during the Wagner uprising in June and others hinted at last week as the early eulogies poured in. On Tuesday, Pjotr Sauer covered Prigozhin’s ‘closed format’ funeral in St Petersburg, where the secrecy appeared to demonstrate the Kremlin’s unease over Prigozhin’s legacy.

 

Ukrainian drones attack planes and six Russian regions

 

Ukrainian drones have attacked at least six regions deep within Russia, including an airfield where they destroyed military transport planes, in one of the largest-scale attacks on Russia in months, Pjotr Sauer reported.

A drone assault on the city of Pskov in north-western Russia damaged four IL-76 military cargo aircraft, Russian authorities said early on Wednesday, engulfing two of the planes in flames.

Andriy Yusov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, confirmed the strike on the city on Wednesday, saying all four IL-76 military cargo planes had been destroyed and adding that “several more planes were damaged”.

 

FULL ROUND-UP

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