Two months to the day when Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a brief rebellion against the Russian military, the Wagner chief is now presumed to be dead after a fatal plane crash north of Moscow killed all 10 people on board. Prigozhin was on the plane, according to Russia's civil aviation agency, which cited the airline.
Videos on social media showed a plane dropping like a stone from a large cloud of smoke, twisting wildly as it fell. Minutes after the crash, Russia's civilian aviation agency, Rosaviatsia reported that the Wagner chief was indeed on board the plane. The crash immediately raised suspicions since the fate of the founder of the Wagner private military company has been the subject of intense speculation ever since he mounted the mutiny.
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In June, Prigozhin led a short-lived rebellion against Russia’s conventional army with thousands of mercenaries taking up weapons and marching from southern Russia towards Moscow with the aim of toppling the country’s military leaders. Prigozhin had then declared that “this is not an armed rebellion, but a march of justice.”
His troops pulled back from front-line action after capturing Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, in late May. Bakhmut had been the subject of arguably the bloodiest battles in the entire war, with the Russian forces struggling to seize it for months. After the rebellion, Russian officials said his fighters would only be able to return to Ukraine as part of the regular army.
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The mutiny ended with a deal -- where Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko played a mediator -- under which Prigozhin was expected to move to neighbouring Belarus with his army. Since then, he has refused to cede command of Wagner, but mostly stayed out of the public eye.
Plane crash
Russia's state news agency Tass reported that a plane carrying three crew members and seven passengers that was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg went down almost 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of the capital. Flight tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press showed a private jet that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.
The signal stopped suddenly while the plane was at altitude and traveling at speed. In an image posted by a pro-Wagner social media account showing burning wreckage, a partial tail number matching a jet previously used by Prigozhin could be seen.
In the more than 20 years that the jet model has been in service, the news outlet Reuters said that only one previous crash has been recorded, attributed to mistakes by crew members. Russia's Investigative Committee opened an investigation into the crash on charges of violating air safety rules, as is typical when they open such probes.
Meanwhile, United States President Joe Biden expressed little shock upon hearing about his apparent death. “I’m not surprised,” Biden told reporters. He clarified, however, that he did not know exactly what was behind the crash. “There is not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer.”
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Tagging a news report, US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said, "If confirmed, no one should be surprised."
