A paramilitary group has suggested it wished to assassinate the Russian president after the death of Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
A Russian paramilitary group opposed to the nation’s leadership has called for the elimination of President Vladimir Putin, and suggested in a tweet that a target was now on the Russian president following the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Legion Svoboda, or the Freedom of Russia Legion, a Ukrainian-based outfit of Russian dissidents formed shortly after Putin’s invasion last year, wrote that only the joint efforts of the „anti-Putin coalition“—itself included—could remove him from power.
Russia has been in a fragile internal state in recent months, with the Kremlin leadership facing an armed revolt, drone attacks and reported waning public morale as what was intended to be a short invasion has become a long, attritional war with more than an estimated 200,000 Russian casualties.
Fears that Putin was looking to reassert his authority were heightened this week after Prigozhin, whose private militia staged an aborted mutiny in June, was among those reported to have been killed in a plane crash.
The untimely presumed death of the mercenary oligarch—announced by the Russian government on Wednesday—prompted speculation that Prigozhin, who had originally been allowed to live in exile in Belarus by Putin after the uprising, had either faked his own death or been targeted for his disloyalty.
