Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and top officers of his private Wagner military company were presumed dead in a plane crash that was widely seen as an assassination, two months after they staged a mutiny that dented Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority.
Russia’s civil aviation agency said that Prigozhin and six top lieutenants were on a business jet that crashed on Wednesday, soon after taking off from Moscow, with a crew of three.
Rescuers found all 10 bodies and Russian media cited sources in Wagner who confirmed his death.
Photo: AFP
Police cordoned off the field where the plane crashed a few hundred kilometers north of Moscow.
A resident of a village near the site of the plane crash said that he had heard a bang, then saw the jet plummet to the ground.
“I hear an explosion or a bang. Usually, if an explosion happens on the ground then you get an echo, but it was just a bang and I looked up and saw white smoke,” Kuzhenkino resident Vitaly Stepenok, 72, told reporters.
Photo: AFP / Wagner-linked Telegram channel @grey_zone
“One wing flew off in one direction and the fuselage went like that,” he said, gesturing with his arms to show how the plane headed toward the ground.
“And then it glided down on one wing. It didn’t nose-dive, it was gliding,” he said.
At Wagner’s headquarters in St Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross.
US and other Western officials long expected Putin to go after Prigozhin, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the June 23 and 24 mutiny.
“I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised,” US President Joe Biden said. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
Prigozhin supporters wrote online that the plane was deliberately downed, including suggesting it could have been hit by a missile or targeted by a bomb.
These claims could not be independently verified.
“The downing of the plane was certainly no mere coincidence,” Janis Sarts, director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told Latvian television.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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