Vladimir Putin has expressed his condolences after Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and some of his top lieutenants were presumed dead in a plane crash.
The founder of the Wagner military company and six other passengers were on a private jet that crashed on Wednesday soon after taking off from Moscow with a crew of three, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority.
Rescuers found 10 bodies, and Russian media cited anonymous sources in Wagner who said Mr Prigozhin was dead. But there has been no official confirmation.
If the deaths are confirmed, the crash would be the most serious blow the group has ever suffered to its leadership.
The passenger manifest included Mr Prigozhin and his second-in-command who baptised the group with his nom de guerre, as well as Wagner’s logistics chief, a fighter wounded by US air strikes in Syria and at least one possible bodyguard.
It was not clear why several high-ranking members of Wagner, including top leaders who are normally exceedingly careful about their security, were on the same flight. The purpose of their joint trip to St Petersburg was unknown.
In all, the other passengers included six of Mr Prigozhin’s lieutenants, along with the three-member flight crew.
At Wagner’s headquarters in St Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross, and supporters of Mr Prigozhin built a makeshift memorial, piling red and white flowers outside the building on Thursday, along with company flags and candles.
Mr Putin broke his silence on the crash, expressing condolences to the families of those who were aboard the jet, including Mr Prigozhin.
He said the passengers had “made a significant contribution” to the fighting in Ukraine.
“We remember this, we know, and we will not forget,” the president said in a televised interview with the Russian-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin.
Mr Putin recalled that he had known Mr Prigozhin since the early 1990s and described him as “a man of difficult fate” who had “made serious mistakes in life, and he achieved the results he needed — both for himself and, when I asked him about it, for the common cause, as in these last months”.
“He was a talented man, a talented businessman,” he added.
Russian state media have not covered the crash extensively, instead focusing on Mr Putin’s remarks to the Brics summit in Johannesburg via video link and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Police, meanwhile, cordoned off the field where the plane went down in Kuzhenkino, about 185 miles north-west of Moscow, as investigators studied its wreckage. Vehicles took away the bodies.
Several Russian social media channels reported that the bodies were burned or disfigured beyond recognition and would need to be identified by DNA. The reports were picked up by independent Russian media, but The Associated Press was not able to independently confirm them.
Mr Prigozhin’s supporters claimed on pro-Wagner messaging app channels that the plane was deliberately downed, including suggesting it could have been hit by a missile or targeted by a bomb on board. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Sergei Mironov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party and former chairman of the upper house of the Russian parliament suggested on his Telegram channel that Mr Prigozhin had been deliberately killed.
“Prigozhin messed with too many people in Russia, Ukraine and the West,” Mr Mironov wrote. It now seems that at some point his number of enemies reached a critical point.”
Russian authorities have said the cause of the crash is under investigation.
Kuzhenkino resident Anastasia Bukharova, 27, said she was walking with her children on Wednesday when she saw the jet, “and then — boom! — it exploded in the sky and began to fall down.” She said she was scared it would hit houses in the village and ran with the children, but it ended up crashing into a field.
“Something sort of was torn from it in the air, and it began to go down and down,” she added.
Numerous opponents and critics of Mr Putin have been killed or become gravely ill in apparent assassination attempts, and US and other Western officials long expected the Russian leader to go after Mr Prigozhin, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the June 23-24 mutiny.
“It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising,” said German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, while acknowledging that the facts were still unclear.
“We know this pattern … in Putin’s Russia — deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also pointed the finger. “We have nothing to do with this. Everyone understands who does,” he said.
According to the civil aviation authority, the flight manifest included Dmitry Utkin, who was long believed to be the founder of Wagner. Mr Utkin’s call sign was Wagner, which became the company’s name. He was a retired special forces officer and a member of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service and was responsible for Wagner command and combat training, according to investigations by the Dossier Centre and Bellingcat.
Other top associates listed on the manifest included Valery Chekalov, who was Wagner’s logistics mastermind, in charge of managing mercenaries and securing weapons, and Yevgeny Makaryan, who was wounded while fighting with Wagner in Syria.
The crash also came the same week that Russian media reported that General Sergei Surovikin, a former top commander in Ukraine who was reportedly linked to Mr Prigozhin, was dismissed from his post as commander of Russia’s air force.
Mr Prigozhin was long outspoken and critical of how Russian generals were waging the war in Ukraine, where his mercenaries were some of the fiercest fighters for the Kremlin. For a long time, Mr Putin appeared content to allow such infighting — and Mr Prigozhin seemed to have unusual latitude to speak his mind.
But Mr Prigozhin’s brief revolt raised the ante. His mercenaries swept through the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and captured the military headquarters there without firing a shot. They then drove to within about 125 miles of Moscow and downed several military aircraft, killing more than a dozen Russian pilots.
Mr Putin first denounced the rebellion — the most serious challenge to his 23-year rule — as “treason” and a “stab in the back”. He vowed to punish its perpetrators, and the world waited for his next move, particularly since Mr Prigozhin had publicly questioned the Russian leader’s justifications for the war in Ukraine, seen as a red line.
But instead Mr Putin made a deal that saw an end to the mutiny in exchange for an amnesty for Mr Prigozhin and his mercenaries and permission for them to move to Belarus.
Now many are suggesting the punishment has finally come.
“The downing of the plane was certainly no mere coincidence,” Janis Sarts, director of Nato’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told Latvian television.
Even if confirmed, Mr Prigozhin’s death is unlikely to have an effect on Russia’s war in Ukraine. His forces fought some of the bloodiest battles over the last 18 months, but pulled back from the front line after capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut in late May. After the rebellion, Russian officials said his fighters would only be able to return to Ukraine as part of the regular army.
The Institute for the Study of War argued that Russian authorities likely moved against Mr Prigozhin and his top associates as “the final step to eliminate Wagner as an independent organisation.”
Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr Putin turned political consultant, said Mr Putin had to step in because, by carrying out the mutiny and remaining free, Mr Prigozhin “shoved Putin’s face into the dirt front of the whole world”.
Failing to punish Mr Prigozhin would have offered an “open invitation for all potential rebels and troublemakers,” so Mr Putin had to act, Mr Gallyamov said.
Flight-tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press showed that a private jet previously used by Mr Prigozhin took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening, and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.
Videos shared by the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone showed a plane dropping like a stone from a large cloud of smoke, twisting wildly as it fell, one of its wings apparently missing. A free fall like that typically occurs when an aircraft sustains severe damage, and a frame-by-frame AP analysis of two videos was consistent with some sort of explosion mid-flight.
