Mercenary group leader who revolted against Vladimir Putin presumed dead in plane crash
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the face of Wagner, was supposedly sent in exile to Belarus after his purported rebellion to oust the Russian military leadership failed.
The leader of a Russian mercenary group who led a brief rebellion against the country’s military was on Wednesday presumed dead after a plane crash near Moscow killed all ten persons on board, the Associated Press reported.
Russia’s civil aviation agency said that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of mercenary group Wagner, was on the plane.
The plane crashed in the Tver region while travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg. The aircraft – an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet – did not show any problem until it suddenly fell down in its final 30 seconds, Reuters reported, citing flight-tracking data.
“Whatever happened, happened quickly,” said Ian Petchenik, a member of real-time airline data tracking service Flightradar24, reported Reuters. Petchenik said that before the sudden drop, there was no indication that there was anything wrong with this aircraft.
On Prigozhin’s presumed death, United States President Joe Biden said that while he did not know the facts of the matter, he was not surprised, reported AFP.
“There’s not much that happens in Russia that [President Vladimir] Putin is not behind,” Biden added.
In June, Prigozhin led an armed rebellion by Wagner in a purported attempt to oust Russia’s military leadership. He claimed that his troops had taken control of the southern city of Rostov and reached within 200 kilometres of Moscow.
However, on June 24, Prigozhin said he had ordered his troops to halt their march to Moscow in order to avoid bloodshed.
“Understanding ...that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and going back to field camps as planned,” he had said in a video from an undisclosed location.
The Kremlin had arrived at a deal with the Wagner group under which Prigozhin and many of his soldiers would go to neighbouring Belarus and Russian authorities would drop charges of mounting an armed rebellion against him.
However, in July, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that the mercenary leader had returned to Russia despite the peace deal, according to The Guardian.