The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said he was not surprised by the crash of a plane this Wednesday in central Russia and whose passenger list included the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgueni Prigozhin. "I do not have specific information about what has happened, but it does not surprise me," Biden said in statements to the press, who also took the opportunity to mention the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, although he did not directly accuse him of the crashed plane.
"There's not much going on in Russia that Putin isn't behind, but I don't have enough information to know the answer. I've been exercising for the last hour and a half," Biden added.
Before speaking to the press, the president, first lady Jill Biden, and members of their family took a Pilates class followed by a spinning class. Biden and her family are enjoying a vacation this week in Lake Tahoe, located between Nevada and California.
Shortly before his public statements, the White House had reported that the president had been informed of what had happened. In a similar tone, the spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, had previously positioned herself, who went to the social network X (formerly Twitter) to say that Biden's team had seen the press articles about what happened. .
"If it is confirmed, no one should be surprised," said Watson, who quoted in his message on X another CNN publication stating that Prigozhin appears on the passenger list of the Embraer private plane, which crashed in the region of Tver, in central Russia.
The Russian emergency services have rescued eight bodies at the place where the device crashed, but for now their identity has not been confirmed, according to the official RIA Novosti news agency. Prigozhin, 62, starred two months ago in a failed military rebellion against the Kremlin in which he came to take one of the most important cities in southern Russia, Rostov-on-Don.
After the mediation of the Belarusian president, Alexandr Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to withdraw his mercenaries and transfer his base to the territory of that former Soviet republic. After accusing him of treason, Putin received him in the Kremlin, after which Prigozhin announced the restart of Wagner's operations in Africa.
Precisely, Prigozhin appeared on Monday for the first time since the riot in a video, in which he suggested that he had returned to Africa to make Russia "even bigger on all continents."
