Russian authorities confirmed Sunday that Prigozhin was killed in the crash, citing DNA testing.
The cause of the crash remains unclear. But U.S. intelligence officials are considering the possibility that the plane went down after an explosion aboard, according to U.S. officials familiar with the preliminary assessment.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied speculation of Kremlin involvement as “all lies.” In June, Prigozhin led a short-lived rebellion against Russia’s top military leadership, prompting wider concerns that Putin would ultimately punish him for the mutiny.
“It is no accident that the world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced former confidant of Putin suddenly, literally falls from the sky two months after he attempted a mutiny,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Thursday.
Here are some Putin foes who suffered suspicious fates:
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was one of the Kremlin’s most outspoken critics. Three years ago, he boarded a plane at an airport in Siberia and fell ill.
Germany later said it had “unequivocal” evidence that he was poisoned with a nerve agent similar to Novichok — a class of chemical weapons developed by the former Soviet Union, of which Russia was the central element.
Navalny was rushed to Berlin for treatment and spent 24 days in intensive care before being discharged from inpatient care about a week later.
He was immediately arrested upon his return to Russia in January 2021. This month, he was sentenced to a further 19 years in prison — with no family visits or letters for a decade — on top of an 11-year sentence he was already serving.
In 2018, a Russian former double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his adult daughter Yulia were found slumped on a park bench in a town in the south of England.
They recovered, but months later, 44-year-old British citizen Dawn Sturgess died and her boyfriend fell ill after spraying a discarded perfume bottle that turned out to have contained a poison.
British investigators identified the weapon as Novichok, and the investigative website Bellingcat first identified the alleged perpetrators as two members of Russian military intelligence agency the GRU: Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga.
Skripal was a high-profile spy who was jailed in Russia in 2006 after being convicted of passing the names of undercover Russian intelligence officers to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. He was released in a prisoner swap in 2010 and has lived in Britain since.
In April, Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of treason — the harshest penalty yet for an opponent of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza is a longtime opposition politician, historian and activist. He has written opinion pieces for The Washington Post, some from prison, about life in Russia. He was one of the Kremlin’s few critics still living in Russia when it invaded Ukraine last year.
His wife, who now lives in the United States, says the Kremlin poisoned her husband for the first time in 2015 and again in 2017. Both times, Kara-Murza was hospitalized and in a coma. The Kremlin denied any involvement.
Alexander Litvinenko was in the bar of an upmarket London hotel when he was poisoned in late 2006.
As he lay dying, he accused Putin of his murder.
In 2016, a decade after Litvinenko’s death, a British inquiry found that he probably was right. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron described the inquiry’s conclusion of “state-sponsored” murder as “absolutely appalling.”
The investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was fatally shot at the doorstep of her Moscow apartment in 2006.
Six years earlier, she had angered the Kremlin with her coverage of abuses by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen forces fighting against Chechen separatists. In 2004, she fell ill after drinking a cup of tea. Politkovskaya said Putin had had her poisoned to prevent her from reporting.
Politkovskaya continued to cover the Russian leader and his allies despite repeated threats against her.
In 2014, five men were convicted of her murder, though no one has been charged with ordering an assassination.
Politician and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov was the highest-profile opposition leader slain in Russia when he was gunned down in 2015 while walking across a bridge in central Moscow.
The Kremlin denied involvement in the killing.
Nemtsov was a towering figure in post-Soviet Russian politics and an architect of the country’s pivot to capitalism. At the time of his death, he was working on a report that, he said, challenged the Kremlin line and showed Russian soldiers fighting alongside pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
William Booth and Robyn Dixon contributed to this report.
