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Updates on Russia and Ukraine: Putin calls Prigozhin a talented man who made “mistakes.”
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One killed, 3 injured in Russian shelling of Kherson: Governor
Russian shelling of Kherson city has killed one person and left three injured, including a child, the regional governor said.
Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Friday morning that 16 Russian shells had hit the city, including a residential area.
“As a result of Russian aggression, one person died, three more were injured, one of them a child,” Prokudin wrote on the Telegram messaging app, according to a translation.
Critical infrastructure and a medical facility in Kherson city were also targets of the Russian attack, he said, without giving details of the extent of the damage.
Prokudin had said earlier that a seven-year-old girl was wounded in a Russian attack on her home in the Kherson region and had been rushed to hospital.
Prigozhin underestimated Putin’s humiliation over Wagner mutiny: Think tank
Prigozhin was confident that Putin would forgive him for mounting a mutiny in June that saw his Wagner fighters occupy a city in southern Russia and his forces shoot down several Russian aircraft, the Washington, DC-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said, citing Russian reports.
According to the ISW, Prigozhin had likely underestimated how personally humiliated Putin was by the Wagner mutiny and the threat by the mercenary force to take Moscow and throw out Russia’s top military commanders.
Prigozhin had also apparently overestimated the value of his own loyalty to Putin. Putin places significant value on loyalty and has frequently rewarded loyal Russian officials and military commanders even when they have failed,” the ISW said in its latest assessment of events in Russia and Ukraine.
“Prigozhin’s rebellion was an act of significant insubordination despite his claim that he rebelled out of loyalty to Russia,” the think tank said.
There are some transgressions, the ISW said, that even Putin views as “too serious for loyalty to overcome”.
Russian TV muted in reporting Prigozhin’s apparent plane crash death
Russian state TV channels Russia 24 and Russia 1 largely stuck to describing the investigation into the plane crash that killed 10, with some only mentioning Prigozhin’s name at the end of their reports.
Russian channels also focused on Thursday on portraying Putin as calm and in control, with extensive coverage given over to Putin’s participation, via virtual link, at the summit of BRICS nations in South Africa, the Associated Press reported.
The closest Russian television seemed to get to addressing reports of the death of Prigozhin was during the television talk show 60 Minutes on Russia 1, which did not cover the plane crash but rather the West’s response to it.
Olga Skabeeva, one of Russia’s most prominent presenters and propagandists, introduced a piece with clipped-up “breaking news” headlines from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, implying the West was responding hysterically.
Another of Russia’s most famous television news anchors, Vladimir Solovyov, suggested Ukraine was behind the reported deaths of Prigozhin and some of his top associates.
There are no independent channels in Russia’s powerful state television network, which encompasses multiple stations across 11 time zones, and Putin has further suppressed dissent since invading Ukraine.
