Free Republic

Wagner Group commander Dmitry Utkin was reportedly among the 10 people killed in a plane crash north of Moscow that also is believed to have claimed the life of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer, has Nazi tattoos on his body. He helped co-found the militant group and came up with the name “Wagner,” which derived from Adolf Hilter’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner. According to reports, Utkin and Prigozhin were just two of Wagner's top men who were listed as passengers on the flight.

Pro-Kremlin media technologist Konstantin Dolgov said he was fired from the Cart ONLINE propaganda project after an interview with Wagner PMC owner Yevgeny Prigozhin. He wrote about this in his telegram channel. In that interview, the businessman criticized the Russian military leadership, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Prigozhin said that the Russian authorities, instead of the goal of demilitarizing Ukraine declared in February 2022, achieved the opposite effect, and the Ukrainian army became one of the strongest in the world. He also stated that during the entire war in Ukraine, 20,000 mercenaries of the Wagner PMC were killed, half of...

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday that the seizure of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine was critical to punching a hole in Ukrainian defences and would allow Moscow's forces to mount further offensive operations deeper inside the country. -snip- Asked about Shoigu's comments on Tuesday, Prigozhin said he did not know what would happen after the capture of Bakhmut, but called on Russia not to get ahead of itself. "They say 'don't sell the skin until you've caught the bear,' but nobody talks about the consequences of trying to remove the skin while the bear is still alive," he...

The office of Russia’s infamous troll factory believed to be at the vanguard of Russia’s information war has been set on fire in St. Petersburg overnight. An investigation revealed last year that the secretive troll factory had rebranded itself as a media conglomerate with 16 news websites generating more than 30 million pageviews every month. Its operational hub, a website called FAN (Federal News Agency), is based a stone’s throw from the troll farm’s original location in northern St. Petersburg. The Fontanka.ru news website cited police as saying that an unknown suspect broke the agency’s ground-floor window and threw a...