At round 5:30 pm Moscow time on August 23, the Embraer Legacy 600 personal enterprise jet took to the skies. Launching from an airport close to the Russian capital, the 13-seater airplane, which has a white physique and blue tail, has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the pinnacle of the brutal Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group.
At 5:46 pm, as soon as the airplane was away from Moscow—an space the place location-tracking GPS indicators are ceaselessly blocked—receivers belonging to flight-tracking community Flightradar24 began selecting up indicators from the Embraer Legacy. For the subsequent 34 minutes, Prigozhin’s airplane was sending out knowledge about its altitude, pace, and autopilot settings that allowed its actions to be tracked.
During this time, the Embraer Legacy seemed to be tremendous. It reached a cruising altitude of 28,000 ft earlier than briefly climbing to 30,000 ft, and it was touring at round a floor pace of round 513 knots. Its flight path headed northwest, away from Moscow and within the path of Russia’s second-largest metropolis, St. Petersburg.
At 6:19 pm, round 30 seconds earlier than the airplane stopped transmitting knowledge altogether, it plunged 8,000 ft towards the bottom. Its final recorded altitude was 19,725, because it flew by the Kuzhenkino village within the Tver Region. The descent was “dramatic,” in response to Flightradar’s evaluation.
Since the airplane smashed into the earth, killing all these onboard, Russian aviation providers, Telegram channels linked to Wagner, and the nation’s state-controlled media have reported that Prigozhin was listed as a passenger. The nation’s aviation company named the Wagner boss amongst 10 folks on the airplane, together with different senior Wagner members, together with cofounder Dmitri Utkin and three crew members.
Officials, in response to Russian state media, are investigating the crash and what could have triggered it, and have reportedly recovered the our bodies. It has been broadly speculated that the airplane might have been shot down by Russian air defenses, maybe in response to Prigozhin’s tried coup two months in the past. No proof to again this up has been offered but, with Russian president Vladimir Putin saying he has despatched his condolences to the households of the lifeless and investigations are trying into what occurred. (One nameless Western intelligence official instructed The New York Times that they consider Prigozhin was on the airplane. Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden has mentioned there may be “not a lot that occurs in Russia that Putin’s not behind.“)
Thanks to Russia’s heavy censorship and propaganda machines, the verifiable fact of what occurred to the Embraer Legacy could by no means be recognized, consultants say.
Amid the dramatic and unfolding incident, there was a void of official info and a swirl of unconfirmed theories. However, the occasion highlights how highly effective Russia’s grip on its info house is: The nation controls its media, has banned unbiased retailers, and tightly censors the web and on-line providers obtainable within the nation. The episode additionally continues to point out how helpful even small quantities of open supply info—reminiscent of photographs or movies posted to social media and open supply knowledge, reminiscent of flight info—might be in establishing what could have occurred. Open supply intelligence, generally known as OSINT, is already being inspected by researchers.
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