Military Coup Underway in Russia

[greysfang]

Wagner chief launches coup against the Kremlin
Russian soldiers put on high alert after Yevgeny Prigozhin accuses military of bombing his fighters and vows to stop the leadership’s ‘evil’

By
James Kilner
23 June 2023 • 9:43pm

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary leader, has launched a coup against the Kremlin after he accused the Russian military of shelling his fighters.

Russian soldiers across the country were put on high alert on Friday night after Prigozhin said that he had 25,000 men ready to fight.

He said: “The commanders’ council of the Wagner Private Military Company has reached a decision.

“The evil that the country’s military leadership perpetuates must be stopped.”

The FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, said that it had opened a criminal case against Prigozhin, once considered one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted fixers, and declared him to be a “foreign agent”.

The case accuses Prigozhin of launching an “armed rebellion inside Russia”. The FSB added: “This is punishable with between 12 and 20 years in prison.”

In the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said that the Russian leader was aware of “the situation around Prigozhin”.

Later reports said that Putin’s motorcade was seen speeding through Moscow to the Kremlin from his residence in the suburbs of the capital.

News reports also said that an emergency plan called “krepost”, or fortress, had deployed Russian soldiers around the capital and to strategic locations.

In Rostov, a large city in the south of Russia that the Russian top military command have been using as their base, armoured personnel carriers were seen guarding street corners.

Prigozhin is a fierce critic of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s Defence Minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the military.

He said that he wanted to avenge the ordinary Russian soldiers who have been killed by incompetent leadership since the start of the invasion of Ukraine last February.

Russia has lost an estimated 220,000 men in the war.

“Everyone who tries to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way,” Prigozhin said in one of several voice messages he posted on the Telegram messaging app.

He did not give his location.

“There are 25,000 of us and we are going to figure out what this chaos is happening in the country,” he said in a later update.

“Anyone who wants to join can. We need to end this mess.”

Prigozhin has been highly visible in Russia’s regions over the past few weeks since withdrawing from the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine where his forces captured the town of Bakhmut.

He has given a series of talks about the war, focusing on his criticism of Mr Shoigu.

And on Friday evening, he accused Mr Shoigu of ordering the Russian military to shell a Wagner camp and published a video of what he said was the remains of the destroyed camp.

In a statement, the Russian Ministry of Defence denied this.

“All the messages and video frames distributed on social networks on behalf of Prigozhin about the alleged strike by the Russian Ministry of Defence on the rear camps of Wagner do not correspond to reality,” it said.

War in Ukraine ‘based on lies’
Earlier on Friday Prigozhin claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was based on lies that the country was a threat to Moscow and its citizens.

In an explosive video, he dismantled the case Vladimir Putin has offered for the war that has killed or wounded more than 220,000 Russian soldiers.

While the outspoken Wagner commander has often criticised the conduct of Russia’s defence ministry, he has not previously attacked the central planks of Moscow’s propaganda.

“The Ministry of Defence deceived the president and the public, telling them that there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they were going to attack us with the entire Nato bloc,” Prigohzin said.

The Wagner founder claimed instead that the war was motivated by the personal ambition of his longtime foe Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, and the avarice of Russian oligarchs.

“The war was needed by Shoigu to become a Marshal not in order to return Russian citizens to our bosoms and not in order to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine,” he said.

“The oligarchs needed the war. This is the clan that manages Russia today. And the second part of the operation was to install Medvedchuk as Ukraine’s president,” he said in a reference to Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russia oligarch who is also a close friend of Putin.

Prigohzin, despite his repeated broadsides at the defence ministry, has refrained from criticising the Russian president, often instead portraying him as misled by his underlings.

Yet his latest assertion directly contradicts the rationale for the war proclaimed by Putin, who said when sending his tanks into Ukraine that it was to demilitarise and “denazify” a country that posed a threat to Russia.

It is a narrative that Russian authorities defend with fines or prison terms for those deemed to have spread “falsehoods” about the war.

There was no response to those claims from the Defence Ministry, which has ignored previous complaints from Prigozhin, in public at least. Nor was there any immediate reaction from the Kremlin, which has also declined in the past to comment on Prigozhin’s outbursts.

Putin has, however, backed a Defence Ministry order, which Prigozhin opposes, that mercenary groups like Wagner must sign contracts putting themselves under ministry control by July 1.

On Thursday, Prigozhin had accused the top brass of lying to Putin and the Russian people about the scale of Russian losses and setbacks in Ukraine.

In Friday’s video, he said Moscow could have struck a deal with Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, before the war, that the conflict had been a disaster for Russia, and that tens of thousands of young lives had been sacrificed needlessly, including members of Russia’s most capable forces.

Portraying the top brass as vodka- and cognac-swilling fools who lunch on caviar, he alleged the Russian war effort was being hobbled by corruption.

“We are bathing in our own blood,” he said. “Time is running out fast.”

Igor Girkin, a staunchly pro-war nationalist blogger who is accused of committing war crimes in Donbas in 2014, called Prigozhin an enemy of Russia after watching the interview.

“Prigozhin should have been brought to a military tribunal for a lot of things. Now also for betrayal,” he said.

www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/23/russia-war-ukraine-based-on-lie-yevgeny-prigozhin/

[sputnik]

holy shitballs. this is huge.
it's telling that the only russian willing to take putin on is the only one that's possibly even worse than him. if this is even about putin. i read somewhere that he's not going after putin, just the generals?
this only works if enough russian military turn go along with him, and i think prigozhin might have blown his load a little early on that one, unless he's just nuts and this is basically a suicide mission. so far no one can tell if he's got significant enough support or not. 

[brookie]

FlightRadar24 is reporting on Facebook that Putin's jet has left Moscow too.

[kittylady]

Jun 24, 2023 4:27:52 GMT sputnik said:

holy shitballs. this is huge.
it's telling that the only russian willing to take putin on is the only one that's possibly even worse than him. if this is even about putin. i read somewhere that he's not going after putin, just the generals?
this only works if enough russian military turn go along with him, and i think prigozhin might have blown his load a little early on that one, unless he's just nuts and this is basically a suicide mission. so far no one can tell if he's got significant enough support or not. 

There's speculation on Reddit (yeah, I know, not a great source, but it's what people are saying) that this is about giving Putin an "out" for the mess that he's made of trying to take Ukraine. Prigozhin kills off the generals, Putin claims he was mislead by the now-dead corrupt and devious traitors who lead "peaceful Mother Russia" into a false war special operation with Ukraine to get rich and elevate themselves, pull all the troops out and then try to pretend it was all a big misunderstanding. Prigozhin gets an immense pay off and declared a Hero of Russia and then somehow gets killed in combat in another money-for-mayhem war special operation elsewhere.



Or it's a serious coup attempt and he's taking advantage of the Russian military being seriously undermanned and underequipped due to the numbers deployed and destroyed in Ukraine.

Whatever the truth is, so far Prigoszhin doesn't seem to have met much resistance. Rostov-on-Don is apparently under his control and they've taken the Southern Defence Command post there, as well as there being reports of Wagner forces taking control of a military facility in Voronezh (about 300 miles from Moscow) and also moving towards Volgograd. Although there are reports of a small column of Chechen soldiers moving towards Rostov-on-Don it still seems that the main military reinforcement seems to be centred around Moscow.

[kittylady]

It's being announced as breaking news that the Russian Civil War has been cancelled and Prigozhin is packing up his toys and going home. No word yet on what has been offered to make it stop.

[sputnik]

kremlin dropping charges against prighozhin and he's moving to belarus lol

[no1novice]

. Summary

The head of the Wagner group will leave for Belarus and charges against his mercenaries will be dropped following their rebellion, Russian state media says
Yevgeny Prigozhin told his forces to return to their bases earlier to "avoid bloodshed" after negotiations with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko
Wagner fighters have begun to leave the southern city of Rostov-on-Don where their mutiny began less than 24 hours ago, according to reports
Prigozhin had called for a rebellion against the Russian army, and his group had been advancing on Moscow
President Vladimir Putin decried Prigozhin's actions as a "betrayal" and "treason" in a TV speech, promising to punish rebels
Security was tightened in Moscow, and the mayor told residents to avoid travelling. All mass outdoor events have been cancelled until 1 July.

Posted at 22:1722:17
What happens now?

Frank Gardner

BBC News, Security Correspondent

Even for seasoned Kremlin-watchers, this has been the most extraordinary 24 hours.

One moment Russia looked to be almost on the brink of civil war with Moscow’s most effective ground force, the Wagner group, rebelling in open defiance of the Kremlin.

The next, it all appeared to be over with the renegade mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin backing down and withdrawing his forces after a phone call from the Belarus leader.

What exactly was said in that phone call?

We are not told, but it’s fair to assume that Prigozhin was given some home truths somewhere along the lines of: "Look, you’re on your own here, no one has come out in support for you, and if you continue on this course a lot of blood is going to be spilled, and that’s Russian blood."

Where does this leave the Wagner group? They have, after all, been a useful arms-length tool for the Kremlin for the past eight years, promoting its interests from Mali to Ukraine with scant regard for human rights.

But it’s hard to see how President Putin could ever again trust his former protege Prigozhin.

He’s accused him of treachery and betrayal and the FSB security forces consider him a criminal.

So expect purges and possibly some reshuffling in the defence ministry. And, meanwhile, the war in Ukraine will likely continue unabated. For the hard-pressed Ukrainian troops on the front line, the intermission is over.
BBC

[greysfang]

This just doesn’t make any sense.

[kittylady]

Jun 24, 2023 23:20:13 GMT greysfang said:

This just doesn’t make any sense.

Yeah something about this whole thing stinks.  Isn't Belarus where Putin was moving nukes to?

[sputnik]

apparently, there had been a lot of disagreements/power struggles between prigozhin and the russian minister of defense and high-ranking generals. and recently, russia was moving to force wagner group troops to come under central russian command, which would effectively defang wagner group and make prigozhin useless. he'd always resisted his troops joining the russian army because his power came from his independence from the russian state. the march was a reaction to that, a mutiny. i guess he didn't have enough outside support to go through with it, but enough power to showcase the internal divisions in the russian state and in the army, since some of them did support prigozhin, and also showed the world that putin's position is weaker than previously thought. and he has enough power that instead of being captured, he's being allowed to leave and go to belarus. but apparently the wagner troops that didn't participate are being asked to sign contracts with the russian army. no idea what's going to happen to prigozhin and the rest of his troops going forward, and if he will indeed go to belarus.
it's all fucking weird though.

[no1novice]

Prigozhin’s rockstar exit from Rostov shows public support for ‘traitor’
Putin may have vowed to ‘liquidate’ the Wagner chief, but residents in the Russian city said they welcomed him

Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates
Pjotr Sauer
Sun 25 Jun 2023 12.36 BST
Follow Pjotr Sauer
Yevgeny Prigozhin left the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don late Saturday to a rapturous reception that resembled the departure of a rockstar, with crowds of men gathering around his car.

The extraordinary scenes of Prigozhin’s departure underlined some of the broader support Prigozhin appears to enjoy among sections of the Russian population, despite Vladimir Putin branding him a “traitor” that he vowed to “liquidate”.

One video showed residents in the city cheering as Prigozhin’s car stopped when one person approached. The smiling warlord, flanked by a convoy of armoured vehicles, then proceeded to shake the man’s hand.

“Take care of yourselves,” shouted another woman.

Some retreating Wagner troops were also seen tooting their horns and shooting into the air, followed by loud applause from the public.



In an abrupt about-face, Prigozhin said on Saturday evening he had called off his Wagner group troops’ march on Moscow and ordered them to move out of Rostov after reaching a deal with the Kremlin.

Earlier in the day, Prigozhin’s troops occupied key buildings in Rostov without meeting any tangible resistance. Some residents told the Guardian that they welcomed the arrival of the warlord.



“I hope he wins.”

In stark contrast, hours after the Wagner troops left the city, some locals appeared to be angrily greeting the police force that took their place, shouting “traitors” and “shame!” at them.



“Putin is afraid of Prigozhin, ordinary people are clearly not,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Moscow.

Kolesnikov said the events in Rostov indicated that Prigozhin’s populist, anti-elite persona who speaks truth to power had clearly resonated with many Russians unhappy with the foundering invasion.

“There is a real interest in Prigozhin and his fighters,” the analyst said.

Kolesnikov added it was remarkable that some locals in Rostov-on-Don were openly showing their sympathies for Prigozhin, in a political climate where even the slightest forms of dissent can lead to long prison sentences.

“The nation longs for a change. To some, Prigozhin is a valuable alternative to Putin.”



www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/25/yevgeny-prigozhin-wagner-rockstar-exit-from-rostov-shows-public-support-for-traitor?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

[brookie]

Nobody "reaches a deal" with the Kremlin.

[sputnik]

the deal is, you get to go until putin finds a way to slip some polonium in your tea.

[sputnik]

Wagner, Prigozhin, Putin and Shoigu: Bitter rivalries that led to a rebellion
Published
5 hours ago




Yevgeny Prigozhin's brief rebellion was motivated as much by personal rivalries as any real political differences with the Kremlin



By Matt Murphy
BBC News
In the end, the Wagner mutiny lasted less than 24 hours. But the toxic cocktail of jealousy, rivalry and ambition that gave rise to it has been months, if not years, in the making.

The main characters of this drama were Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, and the heads of Russia's enormous military - Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov.

Prigozhin - a former criminal who was associated with organised crime in the 1980s and for which he spent several years in prison - is a creation of the Kremlin who owes his enormous wealth to President Vladimir Putin.

Since he formed the Wagner mercenary group in 2014, he has become a key tool of Mr Putin's desire to reimpose Russian influence across the globe. From the shadows, his forces - made up of hardened former Russian special forces - have propped up Mr Putin's ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and helped roll back and replace French influence in Mali.

Until last year Prigozhin consistently denied mounting evidence that he controlled the group, launching lawsuits in British courts against Bellingcat journalist Elliot Higgins who accused him of running the private militia.

The deniable nature of his group's operations have made him popular with Mr Putin and allowed him to build up his own power base, over the last year coming to rival that of the military and security elite that rule Russia.

A man at ease with violence, corruption and ambition - his rise is emblematic of the modern state built by President Vladimir Putin over the past 24 years.

But despite his increasing power, he has remained an outsider among Mr Putin's small inner circle of advisers, unafraid to criticise officials in Moscow he sees as corrupt, lazy or both.

And he has reserved a particular hatred for the head of the military, Valery Gerasimov, and the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu - a fellow outsider - for years.


Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov have run Russia's enormous military together for more than a decade


Unlike most of Mr Putin's key advisers, who tend to hail from the president's home city of St Petersburg, Mr Shoigu was born in a small village on the Russian-Mongolian border.

Despite leading the Russian military for more than a decade, Mr Shoigu never served in uniform, rising through the ranks of the Communist Party before becoming the head of Russia's emergency ministry in the 1990s.

Mr Gerasimov, the third figure in this rivalry, is the ultimate army insider. He cut his teeth putting down a bloody rebellion in Chechnya in the 1990s, and is now the longest serving post-Soviet military chief.

Prigozhin's growing importance in projecting Russian power - and his group's ability to poach top special forces operators from the military by offering higher wages - are believed to have created tensions between the men for several years.

But it's really after the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and in particular post the bloody fighting in the meat grinder of Bakhmut, the battle where thousands of Wagner troops are believed to have been killed - that Prigozhin's hatred for the military elites has come to the fore.

The attempt to seize Bakhmut - a small city with a pre-war population of around 70,000 people - is puzzling. Most observers believe that it has limited military significance and some say the campaign was designed by Prigozhin to allow him to claim credit for a victory amid the military's faltering campaign.

He regularly accused Mr Shoigu and Mr Gerasimov of "constantly trying to steal [credit for] Wagner's victory" in cities like Soledar, where thousands of paramilitary troops - often recruited from prisons - met their deaths.

And by contrast to his more bureaucratic rivals, Progozhin's often foul mouthed rants made him a personality that often caught the attention of the world's media. Leaked documents suggested that the Russian defence ministry was unsure of how to combat his messaging and increasing popularity.

But in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin was content to let it continue.

Allowing rivalries to simmer is very much President Putin's style. He has long permitted competing power centres to fight among each other for influence, believing that it would prevent one faction from gaining enough prominence to challenge him directly.

Daniel Triestman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote last year that the system created by Mr Putin contains "tripwires" to prevent a coup, noting that officials "with armed men at their command lack the mutual trust to organise a conspiracy".

In this regime, Mr Shoigu is kept in check by Wagner, while the mercenaries remain cowed by the military. At the top of the pyramid sits Mr Putin, the chess master moving pieces around the board and maintaining balance in the system.

Meanwhile, Prigozhin has always been careful to avoid criticising the president directly, instead suggesting that Russia's litany of failures since the invasion in February 2022 were due to Mr Putin being misled by his commanders.

For Mr Putin, it was useful to allow the mercenary boss to pin the blame for the failing military campaign on underlings. The Russian president is believed to have privately criticised Shoigu and Gerasimov for the slow pace of the invasion.

But in recent months, Mr Putin's long held strategy has appeared to fray.

Prigozhin - increasingly irate over his suspicion that the military was withholding ammunition from his forces as they attempted to complete the capture of Bakhmut - began posting more and more unhinged Telegram rants.

In one video - with the remains of dozens of dead Wagner fighters visibly surrounding him in the background - he raged: "You [expletive] who aren't giving us ammunition, you scum, you will eat their guts in Hell!"

"Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the... ammunition?... They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices," he yelled in another video, seemingly attempting to blackmail Moscow by threatening to pull his forces off the front lines and abandon the fight for Bakhmut.

According to US intelligence documents leaked by American airman Jack Teixera, Prigozhin was summoned to a meeting with Mr Putin and Mr Shoigu on 22 February - the same day he posted the video among the Wagner corpses.

"The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin's public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu," one document read, using a different spelling of the defence chief's surname.

But the summit appears not to have had the desired effect.


Questions will be asked about the ease with which Wagner troops moved through Russia and took key sites


Meanwhile, in Moscow, Mr Shoigu was putting the finishing touches to a plan he hoped would reduce his adversary's influence for good.

The defence chief has sometimes faced criticism over his lack of uniformed service, but his knowledge of how to bend the Russian political system to his will is second to none.

He has remained in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991, and few of President Putin's advisers have spent longer at his side.

On 10 June he unveiled his plan, announcing that "volunteer formations" would be asked to sign contracts directly with the ministry of defence, integrating them with the military and giving them a new legal status.

The bill gave PMCs - or Volunteer Formations - until 1 July to comply and sign the contracts.

While the announcement didn't mention Wagner directly, it was widely viewed as a move to reduce Prigozhin's influence, immediately invoking the mercenary boss's fury.

"Wagner will not sign any contracts with Shoigu," Prigozhin raged. "Shoigu cannot properly manage military formation."

Nonetheless, the move will have set off alarm bells in Prigozhin's head. As a veteran political operator, Mr Shoigu would not have moved to take control of Wagner without knowing he had the approval of President Putin.

Prigozhin may have recognised that after months of indulging his attention seeking rants and criticism of the "special military operation", the president had finally decided to back his defence chiefs and marginalise his old ally.

Days later, Mr Putin delivered his personal seal to the move, telling reporters in Moscow it was "in line with common sense" and had to "done as quickly as possible".

Some have suggested that this was the moment Prigozhin started to plan his mutiny, with the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) saying he "likely gambled that his only avenue to retain Wagner Group as an independent force was to march against the Russian Ministry of Defence".

His troops soon escalated their campaign against the regular military, kidnapping a Russian field commander they accused of opening fire on Wagner troops.

US media reports that intelligence officials, having analysed Wagner movements for several days, briefed the Biden administration that Prigozhin was planning some sort of action.

And on Friday the mercenary boss unleashed his most damning criticism of the defence minister yet.

Departing from the false Russian line long promoted by President Putin himself that Russia invaded Ukraine to ward off Nato and Nazis, Prigozhin raged that the conflict was nothing more than an excuse for Mr Shoigu to win more medals and obtain the ultimate military honour of being promoted to the rank of Marshal.

"The Ministry of Defence is trying to deceive the public, deceive the president," he raged in a Telegram video.

That evening, less than two weeks after the defence ministry announced their plan to seize control of the Wagner Group, Prigozhin and his troops left Ukraine and took the Russian city of Rostov.

Some have speculated that Prigozhin agreed to end his rebellion after winning concessions from Mr Putin, which could include changes at the top of the defence ministry, but whether this is true remains unclear.

Who would replace Mr Shoigu and Mr Gerasimov is equally unclear.

Gen Sergei Surovikin, once an ally of Prigozhin's but who spoke out against his mutiny, could be in line for a promotion. Known as General Armageddon, he commanded the invasion force briefly last year and was behind the largely ineffectual bombing campaign against civilian targets.

What happens to Prigozhin himself is another matter. His decision to halt his march of Moscow will likely anger many hard-line pro-war elements in Russia, while the ISW observed that "many Wagner personnel will likely be displeased with the potential of signing contracts" with the defence ministry.

And it is unclear whether he will be permitted to retain his enormous wealth. Reports in Russian media said some £38m ($48m) in cash was found during a raid on Wagner headquarters in St Petersburg, which Prigozhin said was used to compensate the families of dead troopers.

While this rebellion was largely strangled in its crib, and the military duo of Shoigu and Gerasimov have removed a major threat to their power, the conditions that gave rise to the mutiny remain.

Around 10 private military companies now operate in Russia, with their allegiance belonging to a collection of security officials, oil giants and oligarchs.

Mr Shoigu is said to control his own company called Patriot PMC which operates in Ukraine and is in direct competition with Wagner, according to the US state department.

The loyalty of these groups to the regime must now be questionable at best, and may weaken the assumption that Mr Putin's government is more capable of withstanding a long conflict in Ukraine than President Volodymyr Zelensky's government in Kyiv.

"The hopes of a part of the Russian elite, including, apparently, the president himself, that a long war is beneficial for Russia…are a dangerous illusion," said Ruslan Pukhov, an analyst with the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (Cast).

"Prolongation of the war carries huge domestic political risks for the Russian Federation."


www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66013532

[kittylady]

Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin presumed dead after Russia plane crash


Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a jet which crashed killing all on board, Russia's civil aviation authority has said.

Earlier, Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone reported the Embraer aircraft was shot down by air defences in the Tver region, north of Moscow.

The jet, which was flying from the capital to St Petersburg, was carrying seven passengers and three crew.

Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against the Russian armed forces in June.

Grey Zone said local residents heard two bangs before the crash and saw two vapour trails.

Tass news agency said the plane, a private Embraer Legacy, caught fire on hitting the ground, adding that four bodies had already been found.

The aircraft had been in the air for less than half an hour, it said.

The 62-year-old mercenary boss headed the mutiny on 23-24 June, moving his troops from Ukraine, seizing the southern Russian city of Rostov on Don, and threatening to march on Moscow.

The move came after months of tension with Russian military commanders over the Ukraine conflict.

The stand-off was settled by a deal which allowed Wagner troops to move to Belarus, or join the Russian army.

Prigozhin himself agreed to relocate to Belarus but has apparently been able to move freely, being seen in Russia and also reportedly visiting Africa.

Source: BBC News

The Daily Mail is also running an article where a source/eye witness is claiming that the plane came apart before hitting the ground and that the pilots bodies were "torn to pieces".