Genetic tests confirm that Wagner’s boss, Evgeny Prigozhin, was one of ten killed in the plane that crashed in the Tver region north of Moscow on Wednesday.
The Investigative Committee of Russia announced that “according to the results of the molecular analyzes, the identity of the 10 dead could be determined. They correspond to the list that appears on the flight sheet,” it added. In that registry is not only Prigozhin, but also the prominent far-right Dimitri Utkin, his right-hand man and who helped him found the Wagner group.
The private plane belonging to the Wagner mercenary group crashed on August 23 while flying to Saint Petersburg from Moscow. The bodies were charred.
Prigozhin, who was a close ally of Putin, led a brief mutiny on June 23-24 in which Wagner’s fighters seized the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and marched within 200 kilometers of Moscow. A Russian military plane was shot down during the riot and in total 13 Russian Air Force personnel were killed. It was the most serious challenge to Putin in his more than two decades in power.
U.S. and other Western officials believe the crash was the result of an explosion on board and several have said they believe President Vladimir Putin may have ordered Prigozhin’s killing in retaliation for his mutiny, reports the Kremlin dismissed on Friday. as an “absolute lie”.
Russian authorities have yet to say what caused his private jet to fall out of the sky. But Russian media are starting to promote conspiracy theories about Prigozhin’s death. They all have something in common: they exonerate Vladimir Putin. Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired general of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, rejected the version that Russian special services were involved in the plane crash. Reshetnikov believes that if the Russian special services had to eliminate Prigozhin, they would have done it in Africa.
Prigozhin’s private plane crashed two months to the day Prigozhin led an unsuccessful mutiny against the top brass of the Russian army.
Reshetnikov believes that the attack bears the typical signature of the Anglo-Saxons, because “they really like to do all kinds of things for anniversaries,” he explained in the publication ‘Military Affairs’, also recalling that those days were Ukraine’s Independence Day .
United Russia deputy Oleg Matveychev also sees a “classic move by the Anglo-Saxons to create an unstable situation in the country” and believes that these “provocations” will increase in the next six months, ahead of the presidential elections in March.
Other media lean towards treason. Citing a former Russian intelligence officer named Anton M, the ultra-conservative channel ‘Tsargrad’ claims that Wagner was thoroughly checking the explosives on his plane. That means it was done by a close Prigozhin ally or airport staff, not the government: “Putin forgave him. But the enemies did not.” The same channel indirectly pointed to France, claiming that Wagner was about to enter Niger. Another defense expert Roman Alejin accuses NATO directly.
Prigozhin’s death has not surprised American intelligence. CIA chief William Burns already said last month that Putin would likely seek retaliation against Prigozhin. “Putin is the supreme apostle of revenge,” he said July 20 at the Aspen Security Forum.
