During their 400-mile march toward Moscow, Wagner mercenaries shot down six Russian aircraft: five helicopters and a very valuable Ilyushin Il-22M Coot radio-relay plane.
The weekend mutiny by The Wagner Group, Russia’s shadowy mercenary army, ended as abruptly as it began. Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin on Friday ordered his fighters to cross the border into Russia after, he claimed, Russian forces bombarded a Wagner base in Ukraine.
A day later, he turned his men around and reportedly retreated with them to Belarus. “The moment has come when blood may spill,” Prigozhin explained. “That’s why … we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps.”
That command-post and relay plane is a particularly painful loss for the Russian air force. The Russians have deployed the four-engine, propeller-driven Il-22Ms and similar planes to coordinate their air war over Ukraine.
The aircraft are so valuable that Ukrainian forces have gone to extraordinary lengths to target them — with little success. The planes tend to stay inside Russian air space, after all.
When Wagner shot down that Il-22M, it did Ukraine a huge favor. The Russian air force has just 30 Il-22Ms and variants.
The weekend mutiny was the culmination of a long war of words between the official military establishment in Russia and The Wagner Group, easily the most powerful of Russia’s many mercenary firms.
Wagner had lost thousands of fighters in human-wave attacks on Ukrainian positions in the ruins of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region — “stupid meat assaults,” Prigozhin called them. He blamed the Kremlin for wasting his men’s lives.
In rolling his fighters through the cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh toward Moscow this weekend, Prigozhin aimed to unseat the Kremlin’s top military leaders, including defense minister Sergei Shoigu.
