by tyler | Aug 26, 2023 | CNN, europe
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said he warned Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin twice to watch out for threats to his life.
“The first time was when I phoned him and negotiations (were taking) place while they were marching on Moscow,” Lukashenko told reporters in comments carried by Belarusian state news agency Belta on Friday.
“I told him: ‘Yevgeny, do you understand that you will doom your people and will perish yourself?’ He had just come back from the front. On an impulse he said: ‘I will die then, damn it!”
The longtime Belarusian leader’s comments came just days after a plane believed to be carrying Prigozhin, the notorious head of the mercenary group Wagner, crashed in a field northwest of Moscow while en route to St. Petersburg.
The crash came two months to the day after Prigozhin launched a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership, posing an unprecedented challenge to the authority of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It is not clear yet what caused the crash, but US and western intelligence officials that CNN has spoken to believe it was deliberate. Russian authorities have launched a criminal investigation.
The Kremlin on Friday denied any involvement in the plane crash and no evidence has been presented that points to the involvement of Putin or Russian security services.
The Belarusian leader said that during second time he spoke with Prigozhin he warned him “in no uncertain terms to watch it.”
Lukashenko did not say when the meeting took place. He added that Dmitriy Utkin, a long-term lieutenant of Prigozhin’s, had come alongside Prigozhin.
The Belarusian President said he suggested to Prigozhin that he could talk with Putin and “guarantee full security” in Belarus if he was concerned for his security, Belta reported.
“I said: ‘If you are afraid of something, I will talk to President (Vladimir) Putin and we will extract you to Belarus. We guarantee full security to you in Belarus.’ And credit where credit is due, Yevgeny Prigozhin has never asked me to separately pay attention to security matters,” Lukashenko said, according to the agency.
Russian authorities have yet to officially confirm Prigozhin’s death, though Putin spoke publicly about him in the past tense on Thursday.
Prigozhin and Utkin were both on the list of passengers released by the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency, and both the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense said it’s likely the Wagner leader was killed in the rash.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said testing is underway to determine who was on board.
Lukashenko previously said that he “could not imagine” that Putin was behind the apparent death of Prigozhin.
“I can’t say who did it. I won’t even become a lawyer for my older brother. But I know Putin – he is a prudent, very calm and slow-paced person when making decisions on other less complex issues. Therefore, I cannot imagine that Putin did it, that he is to blame,” Lukashenko told journalists. “It was too rough, unprofessional work, for that matter,” he added.
According to Belta, Lukashenko said Prigozhin had never asked him for security guarantees following the attempted mutiny two months ago.
“I don’t have to ensure Prigozhin’s safety. This is first of all. Secondly, the conversation (between Prigozhin and Lukashenko) never centered on this,” he said.
He also said Wagner will “live in Belarus,” adding that “within a few days everyone will be here,” referring to Wagner fighters and the deal he struck to host the group after the failed uprising.
“Up to 10 thousand people,” he said. “As long as we need this unit, they will live and work with us.”
Referencing satellite imagery that purported to show camp sites for Wagner fighters being dismantled recently, Lukashenko said: “Why are we removing extra tents, we don’t need so many of them. The core base remains here, someone went on vacation, someone decided to live on the sidelines, but all telephones, addresses, passwords, and appearances are known.”
Prigozhin’s death, however, has thrown Wagner’s future – both in Belarus and elsewhere – in doubt.
by tyler | Aug 26, 2023 | CNN, europe
Yevgeny Prigozhin turned the Wagner Group from a shadowy band of mercenaries into a feared military powerhouse operating across multiple countries on three continents. Now that he is gone, the future of the group is anyone’s guess.
The warlord is presumed dead after aviation authorities said he was on board a jet that crashed near Moscow on Wednesday, exactly two months after he launched a short-lived rebellion in Russia.
Most security experts doubt Wagner can survive without Prigozhin, posing major questions about what will happen to the group’s fighters, weapons and operations.
They said the Kremlin may seek to further absorb the group into the Russian military, or try to replace the Wagner chief with an ally, but it’s unlikely there will be much appetite for that among Prigozhin’s men. What’s clear is that the fallout will be felt far beyond Russia’s borders, especially in African countries where Wagner has been employed to help prop up leaders and suppress rebellions.
“My guess is that (Wagner) is going to fall apart without him because he led the group in a very personalized manner, in a way where loyalty was to him over any other entity or person,” said Natasha Lindstaedt, a professor at the University of Essex who researches authoritarian regimes and violent non-state actors.
The kind of clear chain of command that is common in traditional military does not exist in Wagner, which makes Prigozhin’s demise a potentially existential problem for the group. “It’s really all about him and once he is gone, it will be more chaotic. It’s not clear where the loyalties are going to go to,” Lindstaedt told CNN.
The leadership vacuum is even more acute given that two of Prigozhin’s trusted lieutenants – Wagner field commander Dmitriy Utkin and logistics chief Valeriy Chekalov – were also on the plane, according to the authorities.
Utkin in particular is a major loss; reportedly a former Russian intelligence officer who went by the call-sign “Wagner,” he was described as the founder of the group by the United States when it sanctioned him over his role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2017.
Wagner wielded an unusual amount of power for a mercenary group, and a lot of that was down to Prigozhin and his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nicknamed “Putin’s private army,” Wagner was used to boost Russia’s influence across the world.
“They have been deployed to many countries in Africa and Middle East and also initially to the Donbas in Ukraine, and they’ve done a great job of promoting Russian foreign policy through very shadowy and illegal means of controlling political actors, extracting fossil fuels and other resources from these countries,” said Huseyn Aliyev, lecturer at University of Glasgow who researches non-state armed groups in Russia and Ukraine.
Wagner’s influence rose further over the course of Russia’s war on Ukraine, especially after the group took a leading role in the assaults on Soledar and Bakhmut, showing little regard for the lives of its troops in the process. The capture of those cities – at a huge human cost – was a rare Russian gain in Ukraine.
But with its growing influence, Wagner quickly became a headache for the Kremlin. “It started to get out of the Kremlin’s control because they were given green light to do a lot of things … to recruit prison inmates, to get almost unlimited access to weapons from the Ministry of Defense in order to achieve things in Ukraine, but instead, they became, especially Prigozhin, very powerful and influential,” Aliyev said.
The success on the battleground emboldened Prigozhin. “He started to see that he had his own following, and that the loyalty from his own following was getting greater and greater and he felt the Wagner Group was by far the most effective Russian fighting force,” Lindstaedt said.
Now that Prigozhin is no longer in the picture, the Kremlin will need to decide what to do next with the group – whether to legalize it and make it part of the Russian armed forces, or let it continue on in some other form.
The Russian Ministry of Defense tried to swallow the Wagner Group earlier this summer, announcing in early June that “volunteer units” and private military groups would be required to sign a contract with the ministry.
Aliyev said the Kremlin was trying to reduce Prigozhin’s sway as he became bolder and more difficult to control.
Prigozhin refused to obey the order and continued to criticize the military leadership. This culminated in late June, when Prigozhin ordered his troops to take over a Russian military base in Rostov-on-Don and began a march on Moscow before pulling back.
“The fact that he was so brazen, taking on this mutiny, that is a sign that, to some extent, he was delusional,” Lindstaedt added.
While Putin has called Wagner’s actions “treason” he has floated around the idea of the group being incorporated into Russia’s military. In the wake of the uprising, Putin told the Russian business daily newspaper Kommersant that he had offered Wagner commanders the option to continue to fight for Russia.
Now, with the troublesome warlord gone, Putin is likely to want to keep Wagner outside the formal structures, Aliyev said.
“I would expect that Kremlin will try to keep it as this kind of non-registered, officially non-existent private military company in order to use it in these different enterprises overseas. It can put someone more loyal in charge, someone closer to Kremlin … but it obviously will not be the same type of group because a lot of things in Wagner were absolutely fixated on Prigozhin,” he said.
The UK Ministry of Defense said in its intelligence update on Friday that Prigozhin’s demise would “almost certainly” have a “deeply destabilising effect on the Wagner Group.”
“His personal attributes of hyper-activity, exceptional audacity, a drive for results and extreme brutality permeated Wagner and are unlikely to be matched by any successor.”
Lindstaedt said it was unlikely Russia will be able to gain full control over the group. “What I see as more likely is splintering. And Russia won’t have full control over this and I think you’re gonna see quite a bit of chaos and that’s very dangerous because these types of groups once they splinter, they get more bold and they pose a huge threat to regional security,” she said.
But Wagner’s influence goes way beyond Russia. The mercenary group has fought alongside Russian troops in Syria and has been engaged in a wide range of activities in Africa, with some experts estimating it operated in more than a dozen countries.
There were indications that Prigozhin was planning to refocus Wagner’s operations on the continent following the failed mutiny.
Last month he was spotted meeting African dignitaries at a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg. Earlier this week, before his apparent death, video emerged of Yevgeny Progozhin speaking from desert surroundings in what analysts said was likely Mali. In the video, Prigozhin claimed to be “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even freer.”
Wagner’s operations gained momentum after Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, when Russia began to eye the continent’s riches as an avenue to circumvent a slew of Western sanctions. A number of CNN investigations have established Wagner’s involvement in and complicity with atrocities against civilian populations across number of countries.
Wagner got involved in the Central African Republic in 2018, when the Russian government provided military assistance and weapons in exchange for mining concessions. When CAR’s security deteriorated ahead of elections in late 2020, the situation worsened and Wagner switched from training to combat missions. Wagner’s involvement in Mozambique in 2019 was also aimed at battling violent Islamists.
A July 2022 CNN investigation exposed deepening ties between Moscow and Sudan’s military leadership, who granted Russia access to the east African country’s gold riches in exchange for military and political support. In recent months, Wagner had been supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces with missiles to aid their fight against the country’s army, using Libya, where a Wagner-backed rogue general Khalifa Haftar controls swathes of land.
There are growing signs that the Kremlin is trying to tap into some of the lucrative Wagner operations. A Russian military delegation went to the Libyan city of Benghazi this week to meet with Haftar, who has been supported by Wagner for several years.
Reuters cited a Libyan official with knowledge of the meeting as saying that Yevkurov told Haftar that Wagner forces in eastern Libya would report to a new commander. CNN could not verify what was discussed in the meeting and has reached out to two LNA spokespeople for confirmation. A statement by the Russian defense ministry added that the visit aimed at discussing “the prospects for cooperation in the field of combating international terrorism, as well as other issues of joint actions.”
Oluwole Ojewale, Regional Coordinator for Central Africa at the Institute for Security Studies, told CNN Prizgozhin’s death should send a resounding message to leaders across the continent that relying on foreign mercenaries for security sector reform comes with a large risk.
He said the cracks in the foundations of West African and Central African countries that have leaned on the Wagner Group for support could begin to emerge now. “If Wagner collapses, there’s going to be a lot of fallout, a lot of consequences in terms of security relapsing in those countries,” he said, adding that these countries will need to make “critical investments in their own security sector reform.”
But Christopher O. Ogunmodede, a foreign affairs analyst and associate editor at the World Politics Review, told CNN the influence of Wagner in some of the countries it reportedly operated in might have been overplayed. “Its operations were just in a handful of countries. It’s not exactly marching across all of Africa’s 54 countries,” he said.
On top of that, Ogunmodede said some countries have already been looking to send Wagner packing.
“That was already in discussions before Prigozhin died. We could see a swapping out of Wagner’s presence. Already in Mozambique, they were forced to leave, they took a beating there and couldn’t put up a fight, in Mali … there has been some realization there that the junta there made a mistake getting in bed with those guys,” he said.
CAR, where Wagner’s presence is most prominent, the attention could turn to Russia instead, Ogunmodede said. Speaking to Russian state TV channel RT after the Wagner rebellion in June, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov alluded to that possibility and said Russian fighters’ presence in CAR will continue.
by tyler | Aug 26, 2023 | CNN, europe
The French government and the European Union will spend 200 million euros ($215 million) to help the country’s wine producers, who are struggling to cope with falling prices and waning demand.
The French Ministry of Agriculture had initially allocated 160 million euros ($173 million) for the crisis program allowing certain growers to sell excess stock to distillers, who then turn it into other alcoholic products like hand sanitizer.
High demand for the voluntary buyback program, which was announced in June, prompted authorities to stretch its budget to $200 million, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement Friday.
France was, as of 2020, the world’s second-biggest wine producer and its biggest wine exporter. But the industry has taken a hit since the Covid-19 pandemic due to inflation and changing consumption patterns. Increasingly poor harvests due to climate change also threaten the future of French vineyards.
A good harvest last year combined with the waning demand created a glut across Europe, the EU said. As of June, production this year was estimated at about 4% – higher than usual – but consumption is down about 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal. EU wine exports from January to April this year are also 8.5% lower than last.
“This market context is translating into sales difficulties for EU wine growers and producers, reduction of market prices and consequently, a serious loss of income especially in certain regions mostly hit by these trends,” the EU said in a statement in June.
The EU said across the bloc, the most affected wines are reds and rosés produced in certain parts of France, Spain and Portugal.
The French government is also encouraging wine growers to look to alternative crops to cope with climate change and changing market forces. The agriculture ministry also announced a plan to pay up to 6,000 euros ($6,500) per hectare (2.5 acres) to help growers safely uproot vines.
by tyler | Aug 4, 2023 | CNN, europe
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is facing an even longer stint in jail after being sentenced to 19 years in prison on extremism charges, Russian media report, a fresh blow to a fierce critic of Russia’s President Putin that comes amid an intensifying crackdown on dissent.
Navalny was accused of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and a number of other crimes.
He was found guilty on Friday at the high-security penal colony in which he has been detained.
Navalny is already serving sentences totaling 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges that he says were trumped up.
He and his supporters claim that his arrest and imprisonment were politically motivated, intended to silence his criticism of Putin.
The trial ended in June and took place behind closed doors at the IK-6 penal colony at Melekhovo, around 155 miles east of Moscow, where Navalny is being held.
Friday’s verdict extends Navalny’s time in prison and raise further concerns about the brutal crackdown on Putin’s opponents that has been accelerated since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The European Union was quick to condemn the sentence, saying it reiterated its “deep concern about reports of repeated ill-treatment, unjustified and unlawful disciplinary measures, and harassment amounting to physical and psychological torture by prison authorities against Mr Navalny.”
Navalny has been incarcerated in Russia since his return to the country in January 2021, on charges of violating terms of probation related to a years-old fraud case, which he dismisses as politically motivated.
There have been concerns about his wellbeing: Navalny lost weight and suffered stomach pain earlier this year, leading to fears among his lawyers that he had again been poisoned.
He had previously been taken from Russia to Germany in August 2020, after he was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. Navalny arrived comatose at a hospital in Berlin, following a medical evacuation flight from the Siberian city of Omsk.
A joint investigation by CNN and the group Bellingcat implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Navalny’s poisoning, piecing together how an elite unit at the agency had followed Navalny’s team throughout a trip to Siberia, when he fell ill.
The investigation also found that this unit, which included chemical weapons experts, had followed Navalny on more than 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017.
Russia denies involvement in Navalny’s poisoning. Putin himself said in December 2020 that if Russian security services had wanted to kill Navalny, they “would have finished” the job.
Although the Russian authorities’ targeting of Navalny pre-dates Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the country has cracked down even more dramatically on internal opposition and free speech since launching the war.
An expanded and intentionally vague law on “foreign agents” came into effect late last year, requiring organizations and individuals engaging in political activity and receiving funding from abroad to adhere to draconian rules and restrictions.
Russia has also restricted access to Facebook, many Western news sites, and independent media in the country. Peaceful protests were quickly shut down and thousands arrested after Moscow’s invasion.
And the government has adopted a law criminalizing the dissemination of what it called “deliberately false” information about the Russian armed forces, with a maximum penalty is 15 years in prison.
Navalny has nonetheless been a vocal critic of the conflict. On the anniversary of the invasion in February, he called it “an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine under ridiculous pretexts.”
by tyler | Aug 4, 2023 | CNN, europe
Ukrainian sea drones attacked a major naval base in Russia on Friday, leaving a damaged Russian warship listing in the Black Sea in a brazen strike carried out hundreds of miles from Ukrainian-held territory.
Dramatic social media videos showed the vessel, an amphibious Russian landing ship, tilting badly and sitting very low in the water as it was being towed near the base at Novorossiysk, Russia’s largest port.
The incident comes against the backdrop of rising tensions in the Black Sea and stepped up Ukrainian strikes against targets across Russia after President Volodymr Zelensky pledged to “return” the war to Russian territory.
A Ukrainian source told CNN that a sea drone carrying nearly 1,000 pounds of TNT had hit the ship, and claimed there were about 100 Russian servicemen aboard.
“A big navy ship, [the] Olenogorsky Gornyak, was hit,” the source told CNN. “As the result of the attack, the Russian ship has received serious damage and is not able to fulfill its duties.”
CNN was provided with footage showing an unmanned sea drone approaching a ship that appears to match the identity of the one later seen listing in the port of Novorossiysk. The 36-second video, shot from the sea drone, shows it approaching a ship at night. The video ends just as the drone reaches its target.
The Ukrainian source said the operation was was carried out jointly by the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Navy.
The strike was the latest demonstration of Kyiv’s ambitious push to develop long-range unmanned attack vehicles at sea and in the air. The drone that hit the ship would have had to travel several hundred miles to reach the port, whether launched from Ukrainian-controlled territory or from somewhere in the Black Sea.
Novorossiysk, near the Russian city of Krasnodar, is Russia’s largest port by volume of cargo handled and is a base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It is ice-free year-round and has nearly 100 berths, and handles oil and gas exports as well as agricultural exports.
The Olenengorsky Gornyak was one of three Ropucha-class ships that entered the Black Sea weeks before the Russian invasion in February 2022, when a sea-borne assault on the coast around Odesa seemed a likely part of Moscow’s strategy.
The Russians’ failure to advance further west on land in the early days of the invasion, combined with the improvement in Ukrainian defenses since then, has made such an operation highly unlikely and the ship, which is nearly 50 years old, would not have had a key role in the Russian navy’s current Black Sea plans.
But the Ukrainians’ ability to reach Novorossiysk serves notice that Russian surface ships and port infrastructure in the Black Sea are vulnerable to these fast and relatively stealthy weapons, especially with combat payloads of the size that struck the ship.
A Russian military blogger who goes by the name Rybar later reported that one of the Olenengorsky Gornyak’s compartments had been flooded but that it was not in danger of sinking.
Russian officials claimed to have intercepted two Ukrainian sea drones at the port, despite the video evidence to the contrary. The Russian Seafarers Union later claimed the port was “working in normal mode” and that “everything is calm,” state media agency RIA Novosti reported.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak praised the strike in a tweet, saying: “What is happening in the Black Sea? #Drones are changing the rules of the game, returning the waters to full-fledged foreign jurisdiction, and ultimately destroying the value of the Russian fleet. In fact, they are returning everyone to the international law of the sea.”
Other Ukrainian officials were more cryptic in their responses to the attack. Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence, said just as “in Moscow there are unidentified flying objects” – in reference to recent drone strikes on the Russian capital – so too there are now “unidentified floating objects” in the Black Sea.
Yusov said the attack was “a serious slap in the face” for the Kremlin and “in terms of security, of course, this is a big loss for the occupiers’ fleet. Planning further landing operations, including the use of these vessels, becomes more problematic.”
Russian military bloggers reacted to the attack with a mixture of anger, concern and surprise at the ability of Ukraine’s sea drones to strike targets long assumed to be at a “safe” distance.
Sergey Mardan, a Russian journalist and television personality, said the “attack by Ukrainian marine drones on Novorossiysk is simply a quantum leap in the geography of the conflict. It is much larger than even the drones attacking the offices of Russian government ministries.”
Another commentator who writes under the pseudonym Kapral Gashetkin said: “Throughout the entire war, the Novorossiysk Naval Base was the rear of the Black Sea Fleet. It was thought to be relatively safe. However, it is time to realize that the enemy has a ‘long arm’ and can reach very far with it.”
In a separate incident, Russia’s defense ministry claimed its air defenses downed 10 Ukrainian drones over Crimea on Friday morning and suppressed three others.
Some of the strikes on Crimea targeted an oil storage facility at the port of Feodosia, on the peninsula’s southern coast. According to Rybar, Russian troops shot down seven drones and downed another with “electronic warfare equipment.”
Rybar said one of the drones “landed near an oil depot in the city,” but “there is no data on damage yet.”
Ukrainian officials said that attacks on the oil storage facility in Feodosia are “inevitable.”
Natalia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military in the south, said that “Everyone knows that there is a very massive oil storage facility [in Feodosia], where very large reserves can be stored for the Black Sea Fleet.”
“It is clear that the [Russians] will defend this area. And it is clear that the enemy’s logistics are concentrated to some extent in these places… Therefore, “cotton” [explosions] will bloom. And it is inevitable,” Humeniuk said.
Ukraine has previously targeted Russian naval assets in the Black Sea. In April 2022, shortly after the invasion began, one of Russia’s most important warships – the flagship guided-missile cruiser Moskva – sunk, with Ukraine claiming to have downed it with anti-ship cruise missiles.
Friday’s attack comes as tensions ratchet up in the Black Sea, after Russia withdrew from a grain deal crucial to global food supplies and resumed its blockade of Ukraine’s ports, as well as launching a prolonged bombardment of its infrastructure and grain storage facilities.
As Ukraine’s sea drone program has developed, it has increasingly allowed the military to attack and surveil Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea and on the occupied Crimean peninsula.
CNN was granted exclusive access to a sea drone base last week, where officials said the latest version of the drones had a range of 500 miles and were capable of traveling at 50 miles per hour.
Defense sources confirmed to CNN that sea drones were involved in several significant operations, including the attack in July on the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea to Russia. The strike took out a road section of the bridge, which is a vital supply artery for Russian forces.
One of the drone’s developers told CNN that the size and speed of the unmanned boats made them tough for the Russians to track.
“It is very difficult for them to get into such a small drone, it is very difficult to find it,” the developer said. “The speed of these drones exceeds any sea craft in the Black Sea region at the moment.”
After the strike on Friday, Russian military blogger Rybar noted: “It is interesting that the drone approached the large landing ship freely. The crew probably did not expect an attack and therefore did not take measures to destroy the drone.”
In recent weeks, Ukraine has increased its strikes on Russian territory, including in the capital Moscow, in an apparent shift in tactics and in rhetoric.
“Ukraine is getting stronger, and the war is gradually returning to Russia’s territory, to its symbolic centers and military bases,” Zelensky said in his daily address last Sunday. “This is inevitable, natural and absolutely fair.”
by tyler | Aug 2, 2023 | CNN, europe
A heavy metal festival in Germany has been forced to halt admissions after heavy rain turned the site into a mud bath.
The Wacken Open Air festival is an annual event which takes place in fields outside the village of Wacken in northern Germany, attracting tens of thousands of heavy metal music-lovers.
This year, however, incessant rain turned the farmland into a muddy swamp, presenting severe accessibility problems and forcing organizers to cap entry to the sold-out festival for the first time since it began in 1990.
The deteriorating conditions led organizers to announce a “total admission stop” on Wednesday, meaning that only around 60 percent of the 85,000 ticket-holders have been able to enter the event, according to Germany’s dpa news agency.
In a statement posted on the festival’s website, organizers said that “considering the weather conditions, the reasonable visitor capacity for Wacken Open Air 2023 has now been reached.
‘We are very sad, but the continuing difficult weather situation unfortunately leaves us no other choice.”
“Metalheads” with tickets who had not arrived yet were told to turn their cars around and go home.
Videos uploaded on social media show the severity of the situation, with anorak-wearing attendees struggling to wade through ankle-deep mud.
Others chose to embrace the extreme conditions, with one man removing his shirt to nose-dive into the sea of mud, while another lay on his back in the dirt and flailed his limbs.
The muddy conditions have also affected Wacken’s running order, with the start of the festival forced to be postponed. “This meant that six bands could not perform,” a statement on the website said. The festival was set to see 150 bands perform on eight stages over a period of four days.
Iron Maiden, Megadeth and Pennywise are among the bands scheduled to perform at the event, which wraps up on Saturday.
The festival made headlines a few years ago after installing an underground pipeline to bring the hundreds of thousands of liters of beer consumed by revelers to the site.
