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A plane carrying notorious warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner group launched a failed coup against president Vladimir Putin in June, has crashed on a flight from Moscow to St Petersburg. All 10 people on the plane, including three crew members, died in the crash, Russia’s emergency ministry said, according to state newswire RIA Novosti. Russian officials said a man with Prigozhin’s name was among the passengers, without elaborating further.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Yevgeny Primakov, working hand in hand on UN reform, are close friends. When Annan visited Moscow last April, he met first with Primakov and second with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 for what was described by Russian media as an early "working dinner" with Primakov, former President of the Russian Federation. Handpicked by Annan to "reform" the United Nations, Primakov has not surfaced in the probe into the ongoing oil-for-food scandal. Yet, information indicates that he could be the disgraced program’s top Russian connection. Primakov was...

Did United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hightail it to Moscow to check in with his handpicked UN reform man Yevgeny Primakov within weeks of William Safire’s New York Times expose on alleged scandal in the Oil-For-Food Program? The first of Safire’s groundbreaking Oil-For-Food investigative stories ran in mid-March, 2004. Here’s Annan’s Moscow itinerary as documented by The Russian Federation: "Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 where he had an early working dinner with Evgeni (sic) Primakov, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation." On the following day, Annan visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where...

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How a young conscript became a Russian saint When Yevgeny Rodionov was beheaded by Chechen rebels, he was hailed as a contemporary Russian martyr. Andrew Osborn reports 24 November 2004 At a starkly beautiful hilltop cemetery engulfed in a thick winter snowstorm, pilgrims pray to Russia's most unlikely latter-day saint: a young conscript brutally killed in Chechnya eight years ago. Yevgeny Rodionov was 19 when he was beheaded by Chechen rebels. In life, he was an ordinary boy from an unremarkable provincial town who liked to strum on the guitar, compose poetry and dreamt of becoming a cook. But in...