The Plane That The Wagner Group Brought Down That Caused All The Fuss -- July 3, 2023

Locator: 45877UKRAINE. 

Old news: Wagner Group shoots down Putin's vaunted AWACS plane, the IL-22M.

The Russian IL-18.

This is what caused all the fuss:

In its move to advance north of Rostov-on-Don towards Moscow Saturday, Wagner forces shot down a "high value" Russian IL-22M airborne command post aircraft outside the town of Bugaevka, killing its crew and destroying one of the 12 "special mission aircraft."

From wiki, the Russian IL-22. The Russian inventory: 12. The number that are operational: unknown. The number that can actually fly: unknown.

From wiki, the Russian IL-18:

Other sources:

• Aviation Week:
• EurAsian: within their inventory, the crew would have been among the best, the most experienced:

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Meanwhile Putin Takes Charge:
A Corporate Takeover Of Wagner

Link to The WSJ. 

The story begins:

In the wake of a mutiny that almost reached Moscow, Vladimir Putin is facing a new test—managing one of the most complex corporate takeovers in history.

Inside the Wagner Group’s sealed-off glass tower headquarters in St. Petersburg, agents from the Federal Security Services, or FSB, have been scouring the offices for evidence against Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner chief who led last month’s insurrection.

New Kremlin-backed military contractors are launching recruiting drives on Russian social-media networks with recruitment ads to poach some of Wagner’s 30,000 mercenaries, hackers and moneymen, whom the longtime ally of President Putin deployed to Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa.

Across St. Petersburg, Russian law enforcement took computers and servers at Prigozhin’s Patriot Media Group, a key piece of a communication empire that once included the Internet Research Agency, the social-media organization that pumped millions of pro-Kremlin messages onto social-media channels and caused mayhem in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to staff and text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. A likely new owner of Patriot Media, the messages say, is National Media Group, chaired by Alina Kabaeva, the Washington-sanctioned rhythm gymnast the U.S. government believes to be the mother of at least three of Putin’s children.