The Kremlin was silent about the crash, with Prigozhin’s death unconfirmed by Russian authorities or his Concord group press service. However, Russia’s federal aviation service reported that Prigozhin and Utkin were on the passenger list and that all 10 people onboard were killed.
The bodies of those killed, including the three crew members, were transported to a local forensic unit in Tver for analysis, as police blocked access to the crash site near the village of Kuzhenkino.
Prigozhin’s press service has been largely silent since his brief rebellion in June, when Wagner seized control of a major military base in southern Russia, took the commanders hostage, demanded that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu be handed over and sent military convoys on a lightning advance toward Moscow while shooting down several Russian helicopters and planes.
Prigozhin and his commanders escaped charges when Putin made a deal, brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, to allow the mercenaries to either join the Ministry of Defense to continue fighting in Ukraine, retire or go to Belarus.
Prigozhin continued to travel freely between Russia, Belarus and recently Africa, raising eyebrows among many members of the Russian elite, who were stunned that he was not punished.
An official investigation into the crash was underway Thursday, amid widespread speculation in Russia that it was an assassination. Western analysts said the cause of the crash may never be known, given the lack of transparency and politicized nature of Russian criminal investigations.
Paris-based Russia analyst Tatyana Stanovaya said it was unlikely that the Kremlin would tamp down the swirling rumors that the crash was an assassination ordered by Putin, although she said it was not clear what happened.
Without speculating on the cause, she said that “Putin had a strong reason to desire Prigozhin’s death.”
“Putin now looks like a person who eradicated his enemy,” she said, adding that many Russians saw it as a logical step. “I think the Kremlin is not going to make any efforts to try to dissuade the public of this.”
Eyewitnesses described two bangs before the plane tumbled from the sky, local media reported. The plane’s tail separated from the body and landed just over a mile from the main crash site. Questions remained not only on the cause of the crash, but on the plane’s trajectory before it went down and the reasons that so many top Wagner commanders were on one plane.
The flight appeared normal until seconds before the crash, when it went through several sudden ascents and descents for around 30 seconds, descending 8,000 feet from its cruising altitude of around 28,000 feet before plummeting to the ground, according to flight tracker, Flightradar24.
After weeks of hesitation, Putin has moved to restore his bruised authority. An example cited is the arrest of a prominent hard-line nationalist, former intelligence officer and military blogger Igor Girkin, who attacked Putin over his handling of the war for not being tough enough.
Putin has moved sharply to restore military discipline, with several Russian generals who were close to Prigozhin or critical of war blunders dismissed or sidelined including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, known as “General Armageddon” for his ruthless approach.
The Kremlin has also moved in recent months to curb the rampant blogosphere of hard-line, pro-war military bloggers, which had earlier provided criticisms and insights on Russian military setbacks, in contrast to the official obfuscation and disinformation often disseminated by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Despite high casualties and military setbacks, Putin is standing by his unpopular military leadership, Shoigu and the chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov, both despised by hard-line pro-war factions for their military failures.
Some Telegram channels associated with Wagner mourned the deaths of Prigozhin and Utkin on Wednesday, but others urged caution without official confirmation of their deaths.
Putin’s failure to punish Prigozhin over the rebellion shocked members of Russia’s elite, many of whom despised the foul-mouthed, brash Wagner leader as an outsider with a criminal past.
Without Prigozhin, Utkin and other key leadership figures, Wagner is likely to collapse and its remaining operation in the Middle East and its security deals with African governments swiftly taken over by Kremlin-friendly figures.
Prigozhin, Utkin and Valery Chekalov, also believed to be on the flight, are the backbone of Wagner, with Prigozhin the group’s face and financier, Utkin head of combat operations and Chekalov in charge of logistics.
Stanovaya, the analyst, said the fact that Prigozhin traveled around Russia and even met Putin with Wagner commanders in the Kremlin after the mutiny “was questioned by many and of course it was seen as a weakness of Putin. It looked like dependence on Prigozhin. And many asked me whether Prigozhin had some kind of kompromat [compromising material] on Putin.”
She said the presumed deaths of Prigozhin and his commanders marked the effective end of the rebellion, with details of the conditions of the security guarantee that Putin offered Prigozhin unclear.
“This was an unpleasant situation for Putin and in the eyes of the elite he looked humiliated. I think the whole situation was very uncomfortable for Putin.”
In the wake of the brief mutiny, Putin acknowledged for the first time that the group had been fully government-funded, and it has since been unclear whether Prigozhin, who relied on lucrative state-awarded government contracts to bankroll his ventures, could continue to operate it without significant state support. Wagner’s longtime base in the Krasnodar region of Russia is in the process of shutting down.
The group has been exiled to Belarus, where an abandoned military base in the village of Tsel became its home. Independent Belarusian monitoring Hajun project estimated that between 4,000-5,000 fighters have relocated to the country, most likely the most experienced, while the many convicts in the force, which numbered 50,000 during its time in Ukraine, have been let go.
Recent satellite imagery shows the camp has been dwindling, with two dozen tents removed.
“Considering that the reports of Prigozhin’s death were a surprise (albeit not entirely unexpected), it will take some time before the internal processes of private military company reorganization will start,” Hajun said on Telegram. The group said in a separate post that a Russian military plane has traveled between Machulishchi air base in Belarus, previously used by Wagner, and an airfield in Tver, although it is not clear who or what was on the aircraft.
In his last known video, Prigozhin announced that the group renewed previously suspended recruitment efforts to expand its work in Africa adding that Wagner “is making Russia even greater on all continents and Africa more free,” an apparent attempt to promote Wagner’s services there.
Wagner has sent people to prop up authoritarian regimes or fight against rebel groups in the Central African Republic, Mali, Syria, Libya, and Sudan, where they appear to have stayed on in the weeks since the mutiny. Prigozhin’s vast network of operatives and contracts in Africa have posed a diplomatic quandary for the Kremlin, which attempts to untangle itself from the warlord without breaking promises made to its allies on the continent.
Vladimir Osechkin of Russian prisoner rights group Gulagu.net said members of the Wagner Group whom he had contacted had confirmed that he was killed in the crash.
“They are all in shock. The commanders don’t know what to do and what to tell their fighters. Everything was centered on Prigozhin and his connections,” Osechkin said.
He said it was unusual for the group’s top commanders to fly on one plane and quoted Wagner sources saying they were on their way to what they thought was an important meeting about the group’s future.
“They believed — and they were told — that they would be working on some kind of big important project, and they believed that they really had agreed with Putin,” he said.
