Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group that launched a munity against Moscow earlier this summer, is said to have been killed as a private jet crashed near the capital, according to Russian officials.
Rosaviatsia, the Russian aviation authority, said Prigozhin, 62, was one of the passengers listed in the manifest as being onboard the Embraer business jet that crashed on Wednesday evening.
The private jet came down in Russia’s Tver region, the TASS state news agency said, citing the emergencies ministry. The Embraer aircraft, en route from Moscow to St Petersburg, was said to carrying seven passengers and three crew.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the 24-hour armed uprising he led in June would give the Russian state plenty of motive for revenge. The mutiny, ended when a deal was stuck between Prigozhin and the Kremlin – brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko – with Prigozhin’s men 125 miles from Moscow, marked the most significant threat to the authority of President Vladimir Putin during his more than two decades in power. As the news about the crash was breaking, Putin spoke at an event commemorating the Battle of Kursk, hailing the heroes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane. The Baza Telegram group – which is closely associated with Russian security services posted videos allegedly showing the moment of the crash.
In one of them a small plane can be seen spirally into a nosedive before hitting the ground in a huge explosion. In another passersby film from a car the wreckage of what looks like the fuselage of an airplane engulfed in flames. Russian news networks reported claimed that the plane did not descend before the crash – it disappeared from the radar while climbing. Flight tracking data shows a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later. The signal was lost in a rural region where there are no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.
In an image posted by a pro-Wagner social media account showing burning wreckage, a partial tail number matching a private jet belonging to the Wagner group could be seen. The color and placement of the number on the engine of the crashed plane matches prior photos of the Wagner jet. Prigozhin has been reported to use the plane, including shortly after the aborted armed uprising, when the plane departed from St Petersburg to Belarus on the morning of 27 June.
Eight bodies were found at the crash site , Russian state news agency RIA reported on Wednesday, citing the emergency services. According to the agency, search and rescue operations at the crash site are continuing.
Some Russian Telgram channels are circulating reports that Dmitry Utkin, the co-founder of Wagner and a former GRU military intelligence special forces officer, was allegedly also on the plane. Although those reports have not been confirmed.
Once a low-profile businessman, Prigozhin profited from Putin’s patronage, earning the nickname “Putin’s chef”. Prigozhin amassed a fortune from state contracts and later went on to establish a paramilitary army that became an important extension of Russian power abroad.
Moscow would repeatedly deny any official link to the Wagner group, founded in 2014. Fighters for the private military company were deployed in support of Moscow’s allies in countries including Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic. The United States has sanctioned it and accused it of atrocities, which Prigozhin has denied.
Prigozhin has acknowledged that he founded and financed the Internet Research Agency, a company Washington says is a “troll farm” which meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In November 2022 he said he had interfered in US elections and would do so again.
Prigozhin soared in prominence after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where his fighters – including thousands of convicts he recruited from prison – were at the vanguard of the Russian assault on the eastern city of Bakhmut.
That battle became the longest and bloodiest battle of the war, and gave Prigozhin a boost in power among Kremlin circles and among the Russian military elite. It will have also no doubt made him plenty of enemies. Prigozhin used social media to trumpet Wagner’s successes and wage a months-long feud with the military establishment, accusing it of incompetence and openly questions decisions made on the Ukrainian frontline.
In June, Prigozhin led the mutiny in which Wagner fighters took control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shot down a number of military helicopters, killing their pilots, as they advanced towards Moscow. In a television address as Prigozhin’s forces marched twowrads Moscow, Putin called it an act of treachery that would meet with a harsh response. The deal ended the march would be made hours later.
As part of that deal, Prigozhin and some of his fighters would leave for Belarus and a criminal case against him for armed mutiny would be dropped. But confusion has surrounded the implementation of the deal and the future of Prigozhin. The Kremlin said he attended a meeting with Putin five days after the mutiny eneded.
Then, on 5 July, Russian state TV said an investigation against him was still being pursued, and broadcast footage showing cash, passports, weapons and other items it said were seized on a raid on one of his properties. In late July, Prigozhin was photographed in St Petersburg while a Russia-Africa summit was taking place in the city.
This week he then appeared in a video which he suggested was shot in Africa, calling for recruitment to the paramilitary group.
Born in St Petersburg on 1 June, 1961, Prigozhin spent nine years in Soviet prisons for crimes including robbery and fraud. Released in 1990 amid the Soviet Union’s death throes, he launched a career as a caterer and restaurateur in his hometown. He is believed to have met Putin, then a top aide to St Petersburg’s mayor, at this time. Leveraging political connections, Prigozhin was awarded major state contracts, earning the “Putin’s chef” moniker after catering for Kremlin events. More recently he joked that “Putin’s butcher” would be more appropriate.