Russia’s investigative committee said on Sunday it had proved Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary force that led a brief armed uprising opposed to the Russian military, was killed in a plane crash.
Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement that forensic and genetic tests are known to the 10 bodies discovered at Wednesday’s crash site and that the effects are “consistent with the manifest” of the plane. He gave no main points about the imaginable causes of the accident. .
Russia’s civil aviation authority said earlier this week that Prigozhin, 62, and some of his more sensible lieutenants were on the list of passengers and equipment on board the plane. All seven passengers and three crew members were killed when the plane fell from the sky halfway between Moscow. and Prigozhin of St. Petersburg.
Two months ago, Prigozhin organized a one-day mutiny against the Russian army and brought his Ukrainian mercenaries to Moscow. President Vladimir Putin called the act a “betrayal” and vowed to punish those involved.
Instead, the Kremlin reached a temporary agreement with Prigozhin to end the armed revolt, saying he would be allowed to move freely without paying any fees and resettle in Belarus. However, doubts remain about whether Prigozhin would eventually be rewarded for the brief uprising that posed the biggest challenge to Putin’s authority in his 23-year rule.
An initial assessment by U. S. intelligence concluded that an intentional explosion caused the plane to go down. As suspicions grew that the Russian president was the architect of an assassination, the Kremlin dismissed them, calling them a “total lie. “
One of the Western officials who described the initial assessment said we had decided that Prigozhin was “most likely” the target and that an explosion would be in line with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics. “
Prigozhin’s second-in-command, Dmitry Utkin, as well as Wagner’s logistics mastermind, Valery Chekalov, also died in the crash. It was long believed that Utkin founded Wagner and named the organization after him.
The fate of Wagner, who until recently played a leading role in the Russian military’s crusade in Ukraine and has been the subject of concern in several countries in Africa and the Middle East, remains unclear.
After the mutiny, the Kremlin declared Prigozhin exiled in Belarus and his fighters were presented with three options: stay with him there, retire or enlist in the normal Russian army, and return to Ukraine, where Wagner’s mercenaries had fought alongside Russian troops.
Several thousand of Wagner’s mercenaries chose to settle in Belarus, where they were set up camp southeast of the capital, Minsk.