Wagner chief news highlights: Yevgeny Prigozhin killed in plane crash

The passenger manifest of the plane that went down in Russia is essentially a who's who of Wagner mercenaries: Its second-in-command, who baptized the group with his nom de guerre. The logistics chief. A fighter wounded by U.S. airstrikes in Syria. At least one possible bodyguard.

And, of course, Yevgeny Prigozhin himself, Wagner's leader and mutineer who many believed was a marked man after his short-lived uprising in June against the Russian military.

In all, the other passengers included six of Prigozhin's lieutenants, along with the three-member flight crew.

Yevgeny Prigozhin might have retired in peace some day. Or he could have been found writhing in the throes of Novichok, a nerve agent favored by Russia’s spy agencies. He might also have fallen out of a window, crashed in his car, or slipped in his bathroom — like so many Russians lately, and like any of us potentially, reported Bloomberg.

As it happens, Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, a notorious Russian private army, appears to have died when a private plane crashed while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing him and the three pilots and six other passengers said to be on board.

That’s assuming that Prigozhin really was on board. His death has been proclaimed twice before, once in an African plane crash. Both times Prigozhin later turned up professing surprise at reports of his own demise. What’s been said about the autocratic and repressive reign of President Vladimir Putin also applies to Russia generally, including Prigozhin’s Wagner Group: “Nothing is true, and everything is possible.”

Emergency specialists work near wreckages of the private jet linked to Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is seen near the crash site in the Tver region, Russia

The exact circumstances of the death of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin remained unclear Thursday, although most experts believe it marks President Vladimir Putin's vengeance for his short-lived rebellion in June.

The head of the mercenary group, which in June attempted to topple Russia's military leadership, was on board a plane that crashed on Wednesday, with all passengers killed, Russian officials said.

Russian social media accounts linked to the opposition or Wagner itself were echoing the analysis of Western think tanks, seeing Prigozhin living on borrowed time since his aborted march on Moscow two months ago.

The Wagner Group will become an even bigger threat now that it is likely to come under Russian President Vladimir Putin's control following the presumed death of its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Polish prime minister suggested on Thursday.

"The Wagner Group comes under Putin's leadership. Let everyone answer the question for themselves - will the threat be bigger or smaller? For me, that's a rhetorical question." Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.

It’s unclear because some of Progozhin’s top lieutenants were also on the plane, leaving a major void at the top of the organization, Bloomberg reported.

Those men include Dmitry Utkin, a former military intelligence officer who has been a key figure in Wagner since its founding in 2014 to support a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, which laid the groundwork for the current conflict. Valeriy Cherkaskov, who ran Wagner’s sprawling business operations in the Middle East and Africa, was also on board, authorities said.

There have been indications that Wagner’s business empire might be taken over by other Russian groups or government agencies, but that hasn’t been confirmed.

The Wagner fighters that came within 200 kilometers (124 miles) of the Kremlin and killed at least 13 Russian pilots on their march avoided punishment under a deal that saw them dramatically turn back. Some, including Prigozhin himself, then relocated to neighboring Belarus, whose leader helped broker the deal to end the mutiny. It wasn’t clear how many took up an offer to sign up with the Defense Ministry’s forces.

But Prigozhin popped up in Moscow within days of the failed mutiny, attending talks in the Kremlin with Putin in a shock to observers who’d predicted the Wagner founder’s exile. In another apparent affront to Putin’s authority, Prigozhin was pictured mingling with African leaders at a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg last month.

Founded by Prigozhin in 2014, Wagner is a private military company that supported Kremlin objectives on battlefields in Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, where it’s been accused of committing human rights abuses.

At its peak, Wagner had about 50,000 mercenary recruits — many of them ex-inmates recruited directly from prison — fighting in Ukraine.

The US designated the group as a transnational criminal organization earlier this year, and Wagner has been sanctioned by Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the European Union.

The fate of the Wagner Group, the mercenary company behind Vladimir Putin’s murkiest operations from Africa to Ukraine, is in doubt after Russian authorities said that its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was on a private jet that crashed, killing all aboard.

The crash over Russian territory occurred exactly two months after Prigozhin led his fighters on an abortive mutiny that posed the greatest threat to Putin’s near quarter-century rule.

It was complicated, to say the least.

An oligarch, Prigozhin was thought to be close to the Russian leader. He was called “Putin’s chef” due to the services he provided the Kremlin and the personal touches he employed when Putin dined in his restaurants.

In June, when he launched his mutiny against Moscow, Prigozhin must have realized he had gone too far with his public rebukes. The only general he admired, Sergey Surovikin, released a video message telling him to stand down and to “obey” Putin. Prigozhin soon disbanded the march, saying he wanted to spare “Russian blood.” Afterward, the mercenary leader said he met with Putin before leaving for what was expected to be his exile in Belarus.

Prigozhin came from humble beginnings.

He was a petty criminal who, after serving nine years in a Soviet prison, became a hot dog vendor and eventually owned elegant restaurants and a catering service.

He was best known as the rich and connected leader of the Wagner group, a private military force with links to the Russian government. Wagner troops fought on the Russian side in Ukraine, but Prigozhin went public in the spring of 2023 with criticism of the conflict’s cost in terms of Wagner troops and complaints about the way the war was being fought by the Russian government.

Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu was a particular target of Prigozhin’s complaints regarding military strategy.

In June, Prigozhin orchestrated what was effectively a revolt against Russia’s government. He dispatched Wagner troops on a march unimpeded toward Moscow.

Prigozhin was 62 years old at the time of the crash.

Reports suggest that the death of Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and top officers of his private military in a plane crash was widely seen as an assassination. The incident came just two months after they staged a mutiny that dented Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority.

France on Thursday said that there were "reasonable doubts" about the cause of the plane crash that presumably killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's Wagner paramilitary group."We don't yet know the circumstances of this crash. We can have some reasonable doubts," government spokesman Olivier Veran told a regional channel, reported Reuters.

In a 2018 interview, now viral after the plane crash, Putin was asked if he's a forgiving person. The Russian president replied in the affirmative but said "not everything". When the interviewer asked him what was impossible for him to forgive, Putin quickly replied, "Betrayal". Read more here

A Telegram channel linked to Wagner, Grey Zone, pronounced Yevgeny Prigozhin dead, and hailed him as a hero and a patriot who it said had died at the hands of unidentified people it called "traitors to Russia", reported Reuters.

Once a low-profile businessman who benefited because of his connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin moved into the global spotlight with Russia’s war in Ukraine as he headed the mercenary force Wagner. Click here to read all about the Wagner founder

Unconfirmed Russian media reports said that Prigozhin and his associates had attended a meeting on Wednesday with officials from the Russian Defence Ministry, reported Reuters.

The Wagner Group (officially called PMC Wagner), is a private military organization run by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin with tens of thousands of fighters, according to US officials. The group was formed by Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian officer, and financier Yevgeny Prigozhin. Read more here

Christopher Steele, former head of the Russia desk at Britain's foreign intelligence agency (MI6), told BBC that it was "inevitable" that this would be Prigozhin's ending.

British MP Alicia Kearns, who chairs the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the speed that Russian authorities confirmed Prigozhin was onboard "should tell us everything we need to know".

“For Putin there is one unforgivable sin: the betrayal of Putin and Russia. He hunts down those he perceives to be traitors, incl on British shores, such as Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal. Now Yevgeny Prigozhin has been added to that list, ending Putin’s humiliation,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Soon after the plane crashed, a second private jet linked to Prigozhin which also appeared to be heading to St. Petersburg, Prigozhin's home base, turned back to Moscow, flight tracking data showed, and later landed.

Ukraine Presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak wrote on social media that the crash of the plane was a signal from the Kremlin to anyone who showed disloyalty. “The demonstrative elimination of Prigozhin and the Wagner command two months after the coup attempt is a signal from Putin to Russia’s elites ahead of the 2024 elections. ‘Beware! Disloyalty equals death'”, Podolyak wrote, reported ANI citing Al Jazeera.

The crashed private jet carried seven passengers and three crew members. According to Russia's aviation agency, the seven passengers were identified as  - Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin, Sergei Propustin, Yevgeny Makaryan, Alexander Totmin, Valery Chekalov and Nikolai Matuseyev; while the crew members were identified as Captain Alexei Levshin, co-pilot Rustam Karimov and flight attendant Kristina Raspopova.