The regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to reveal the exact circumstances surrounding the mid-air explosion on August 23, of the jet that killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private militia, and six of his colleagues near Moscow. Secrecy is part of the climate of terror imposed by the Russian head of state to consolidate his power, even among those around him. Nevertheless, since the plane went down, the leading Western intelligence services have been exchanging information and trying to find out more about the modus operandi.
According to information transmitted by the United States to their European allies, the explosion was not accidental. This finding was largely based on technical intelligence in the absence of access to aircraft parts. According to the results of the cooperation between Western agencies, agents from Russian military intelligence (GRU) may have played a role in preparing the operation targeting Prigozhin. Among them was Andrei Averyanov, known to the same intelligence services for having headed GRU unit 29 155, the bridgehead of Russian interference in Europe for almost 10 years.
Le Monde was unable to obtain details of the level of Averyanov's involvement. But it has already been proven that his position within Putin's power structure today has been paid back for valuable services rendered to the regime and is no longer the same as it was in 2020. At the end of July, during a meeting with a Malian delegation at a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, he appeared alongside Russian ministers and the heads of conglomerates surrounding Putin. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he could be seen, in front of the cameras, dropping a laconic "Averyanov Andrei, security."
In reality, his profile is quite different. Now a general, Averyanov graduated in 1988 from the Tashkent Military Academy in what was then the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. He spent a large part of his career with the GRU, which, according to British intelligence, came to prominence within the Russian intelligence community with the hardening of the country's foreign policy. The government has made GRU units the clandestine spearhead of this strategy of tension, which has grown steadily since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Tasked during the Cold War with training Communist guerrillas in Asia, Africa and Central America, Unit 29 155 was converted after the fall of the Berlin Wall into the Russian army's action department, notably in Chechnya in the 1990s. In 2012, it was one of three GRU units recognized by the Russian Ministry of Defense for "special achievements within the framework of their military mission," a modest term for often bloody underground actions.
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