Both the Russian Air Force and Wagner say that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the plane that crashed in Russia that evening. According to the authorities, all ten people involved were killed.
A private plane crashed on Wednesday on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Russian media reported Yevgeny Prigozhin whose name was on the passenger list.
Later, the Russian aviation authorities said that the information was true. Wagner also confirms Prigozhin’s death on his Telegram channel.
According to the passenger list, Wagner’s second-in-command was also on the plane Dmitry Utkin.
The Russian news agency Tass reported that the plane caught fire after falling to the ground. RIA Novosti according to the report, the bodies of eight people were found immediately after the crash.
The plane that crashed was the private plane of Wagner’s manager.
Suspicions of the plane being shot down
Immediately after the crash, Wagner raised the suspicion that the plane had been shot down. For example, the Telegram channel connected to Wagner reported that the Tver air defense shot down the plane. The plane had been in the air for less than half an hour.
Information about the shooting down has not been confirmed, but for example the US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which closely follows the war in Ukraine evaluatethat it was almost certainly the Russian president Vladimir Putin of the revenge ordered by the country’s armed forces.
In its review, ISW draws fairly far-reaching conclusions and assesses, among other things, that the armed forces would not have functioned without the order from Putin.
ISW states that it considers Putin to have ordered the assassination until proven otherwise.
Prigožin’s fate uncertain after the June kidnapping attempt
Ylen’s Moscow correspondent Heikki Heiskanen writes in his analysis that the crash of the plane inevitably raises doubts about Putin’s revenge.
On Midsummer, Yevgeny Prigozhin launched an armed rebellion against Putin and the Russian military leadership. The rebellion made the Kremlin look weak when Prigozhin’s forces took over the important city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced quickly towards Moscow, Heiskanen estimated.
However, the rebellion quickly broke out of the leader of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko by brokering an agreement.
Exiled to Belarus, Prigozhin appeared several times in videos after the rebellion and also visited Russia, but his position was considered very uncertain because of the rebellion.
This story tells about the step-by-step life of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was born in Leningrad in 1961, before the June coup attempt.
He was linked to the Russian government for a long time, but especially during the Ukrainian war, he began to criticize the Russian military leadership.
The Russian aviation authority says it is investigating the cause of the crash
The aviation authority Rosaviatsija says he has established a special commission to investigate the cause of the crash, reports news agency AFP.
Dmitri Utkin, who was on the plane, was Wagner’s co-founder
Dmitri Utkin, who was in the crash plane, was considered Prigozhin’s right-hand man, who was about to found Wagner, a mercenary army. He is said to have worked in the private army in the Syrian civil war, among other things.
The mercenary army Wagner is thought to have been named after Utkin, as his military name is said to have been “Wagner”.