Friends have reported that Igor Mangushev, a notorious Russian army captain and mercenary, has passed away in hospital following a head wound sustained days earlier in occupied Ukraine.
Tatyana, Igor Mangushevwife, called his death a “execution.”
In occupied Luhansk, he oversaw an anti-drone team, but in 2014 he had helped create a mercenary outfit that fought Ukrainian soldiers.
Last summer, he performed onstage while holding a human skull.
Igor Mangushev was recorded in an August video shared on social media claiming the skull belonged to a Ukrainian soldier who died protecting the Azovstal steel complex in the southern port of Mariupol.
Igor Mangushev, an extreme nationalist, claimed that the loss of Ukrainian lives was irrelevant because Russia was not at war with people but with the concept of Ukraine as a “anti-Russian state.”
The neo-Nazi movement from which Igor Mangushev emerged to create the private mercenary outfit Yenot (raccoon).
At a later date, it became public knowledge that he had worked as a political strategist with Russia’s most infamous mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Shooting at a checkpoint in the seized Ukrainian village of Kadiivka has sparked extensive conjecture regarding the identities of those responsible for the incident, despite its location far from the front lines.
A 9mm bullet entered the top of his head at an angle of 45 degrees, according to Russian media. Russian authorities are looking into the murder but have not provided any details so far.
It was reported that the bullet had become trapped in his brain. Pictures taken shortly before his death showed him in a hospital bed.
Pavel Gubarev, another radical Russian nationalist, claimed that it was common knowledge who was responsible for the shooting and noted that Prigozhin had gone silent.
Rivalries have emerged among Russia’s shadowy extremist community as a result of the 11-month conflict in Ukraine.
The incident, according to Russia analyst Mark Galeotti, shows that the country is reverting to the 1990s, “when murder was a business practise, and the lines between politics, business, crime, and war were near-meaningless.”
