Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead after a Wagner plane crashed in Russia
Russian state-run news agencies on Wednesday said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group that led a mutiny against Russia’s army in June, was on the list of passengers of a plane that crashed.
“The plane that crashed in the Tver Region listed Yevgeny Prigozhin among its passengers, (Russia’s aviation agency) Rosaviatsia said,” TASS news agency reported, with RIA Novosti and Interfax issuing similar reports.
A private plane crashed in Moscow’s Tver region, killing all 10 people on board, the Russian emergency services said Wednesday.
“A private Embraer Legacy aircraft travelling from Moscow to Saint Petersburg crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Tver Region. There were 10 people on board, including three crew members. According to preliminary information, all those on board died,” the ministry for emergency situation said on Telegram.
Both the Russian state and Prigozhin himself are known to deal in misinformation, and there was no immediate independent confirmation of either the crash or Prigozhin’s death.
Who exactly is Yevgeny Prigozhin and what is the Wagner Group?
It was via his restaurant work that he met Vladimir Putin, at the time the deputy mayor of St Petersburg. With their friendship came government catering contracts for Prigozhin, and a rapid increase in his personal wealth.
Wagner claimed to be an independent company, but was widely seen as a Putin tool – and, after Prigozhin’s attempted mutiny, Putin disclosed that the Russian state had been funding Wagner – to the tune of some R18 billion in its last financial year.
Also after the coup, Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Wagner operations in Mali and the Central African Republic had been agreed on a government-to-government level.