Agree, Every farmer and city dweller has a phone that can take decent movies. You’re standing outside and there’s a strange explosion noise from the sky, sorta like thunder but not, and besides, there’s not enough clouds for it to be thunder. You look up and see some weird smoke trails and something spiraling down from the sky. You reach in your pocket, pull out your phone, and start recording.
Heck, Russians record each other when they have a fussy encounter on the street. Grabbing your witnessing device is almost second nature over there where crooks and conmen in cahoots with the cops have raised “He said she said” to a fine art of extortion.
If that particular person hadn’t gotten a vid, somebody else would have. More likely several somebody’s have, but someone was the first, or most notable, to get it on Telegram. And that’s all that’s (yet) come to the attention of Western media.
Prigo’s jets had been flying back and forth between Moscow & St. Petersburg and other places unmolested since just after the munity ended. They may have had intel to be worried more than usual recently, but the idea they were flying along expecting to be shot at / shot down that day seems implausible. Why would the pilots commit suicide?
As to the two planes, it’s not like they were flying wingtip to wingtip. It’s not real clear what was actually going on with the other plane, but Prigo had two jets and sometimes they flew similar places the same day and other times one was here and another was there.
The missile battery that downed the jet could have taken another shot or three if needed; there’s not much a bizjet can do against SAMs while in cruise. They’re minutes from being able to fly out of range, and nowhere near capable enough to outmaneuver a SAM. Heck, for all we know at this time that may have been the second shot after the first missile failed to track or to explode.
Yeah, the first thought that crossed my mind was that sometimes life imitates art, and that y’all should watch Servant of the People on Netflix. (You should, anyway - it’s quite worthwhile.)
Best response I have seen so far, via the NYT: " Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, posted what appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to the news of the crash on his Telegram account. Yermak, who frequently uses emojis to convey news and reactions, posted a simple audio link — to the song “Highway to Hell.” Link to Telegram post here.
I dunno, missiles can miss, people can play shell games about what plane they’re really on or what flight plan it’s really following, and the remains may be inconclusive.
To respond to part of this, Russian government attempts to kill regime opponents can fail, as when Alexei Navalny (now in prison) was poisoned.
A lot of Russian military attacks fail. And we saw their moon landing recently fail (and a low-budget Indian landing, in the same area of the moon, succeed today). There was no assurance this attempt would have been successful, although it was.
The could have fired more missiles had one missed. Heck, they might have shot at him the last three times he flew someplace and finally got a hit today. Had they missed today we’d have never been the wiser, but there’d be big news when, e.g., next Tuesday his plane unfortunately ran into a passing missile.
I’ll immediately grant the “Which airplane?” shell game. Plus the “Am I even on the plane or was that a body double and I’m hidden in the false floor of a truckload of eggs driving to Switzerland right now?”
Given the Russian paranoia about airplanes in their current wartime conditions, I’d suggest the one sure way for anybody to get shot at, if not shot down, was to be deviating from a filed flight plan or trying to operate without one. That airplane, whichever it was and whoever was aboard, was pretty well certainly exactly where Russian ATC expected it to be and had tracked it from takeoff.
OK what we see here is (a) a very very visible incident that would be obviously fatal to all involved, carried out where it could be seen to happen and (b) the prompt announcement that certain specific individuals are for sure really most sincerely dead, ostensibly because of (a) and we happen to have the papers to prove it right here on our desk right now.
So it could still be that even if the plane that came down was not the one with Prigo in it, he has still been eliminated anyway, and who is going to say that his body was just brought in in a van and plonked amid the wreckage. Or that he is not, as earlier posed, hidden under the false floor of a truckload of eggs never to be heard from by that same name again but still hanging around low key.
Even if he is under those eggs, it was never gonna be happily ever after for him…
As we are talking about rotting in Hell let’s spare a moment for the second in command and founder of the Wagner Group, who was allegedly on the plane too: Dmitri Utkin. I think it is not the first time I post this picture or a similar one:
Planer Earth is a little bit a better place today.
AC/DC beats Wagner: Shot Down In Flames on a Highway To Hell.
OK, let me be the one to challenge you on that: Prigo’s body (just like anybody’s) was about 70% water - and that does not squish or compress - so he will be at least 70 liters “big” (eyballing his weight at 100kg)
Let me throw you a bone here, … maybe you meant he can be juiced into a more compact format?
I meant small in cross-section. We were talking about throwing him out an airplane window, so he just really needs to be skinny. It’s okay if he ends up longer in the process.
I’d say it’s not so much a rule as a guideline. Crushing them probably doesn’t get as much blood on the carpet. Otherwise, you might as well juice them, as suggested earlier.
Three crew also died - probably innocents with families to feed. I feel for them. The Kremlin is really ruthless when it comes to defending whatever it thinks are its ‘interests’. A long list of influential Russians have been murdered since the Ukraine war began - including IIRC two in India, both having fallen out of their hotel windows within days of each other. Surprisingly, the two who died in India were promptly cremated right there in India - and AFAIK no investigations were carried out. Now if that’s not suspicious I don’t know what is.
The one thing I don’t understand is why he had to be killed this way. I would have arrested him, charged him with treason, had a quickie trial and had him shot. For once, the evidence is convincing. Why go to all the trouble to shoot down a plane, losing the aircraft and killing innocent crew members.
