“The presence of the president is not foreseen.” This is how laconic, but categorical, was the response on Tuesday by the Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, to the question of whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is going to attend the funeral of the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgueni Prigozhin.
Peskov also assured that the Russian Presidency does not have information on the date on which the last goodbye will be paid to the controversial Petersburg businessman, who died on August 23 in a plane crash whose causes are currently unknown.
The decision on the funeral of Prigozhin and other employees of the Wagner Group is something to be made by their relatives and friends, Putin’s press secretary said.
The private jet, an Embraer Legacy, in which Prigozhin was traveling on Wednesday of last week crashed while flying from Moscow to Saint Petersburg near the town of Kuzhenkino, in the Tver region, 300 kilometers northwest of the Russian capital. .
All ten people on board, three crew members and seven passengers, including Wagner’s boss and several of his lieutenants, died. On Sunday the Investigative Committee, which is in charge of investigating major crimes, reported that forensic tests and DNA analyzes had been completed, and that they had confirmed Prigozhin’s death.
According to the passenger list provided on the same day of the accident by the Russian civil aviation agency Rossaviatsia, Dimitri Utkin, Wagner’s main commander and co-founder of Russia’s main mercenary army, also traveled on the plane.
The accident came two months after Prigozhin and his mercenaries staged a mutiny against Putin’s top military commanders, during which they seized control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced on Moscow before turning 200 kilometers back. From the capital. The coup ended thanks to a pact between Wagner and the Kremlin, mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. That pact provided for the Wagnerites to leave Russia and go into exile in Belarus.
Peskov called the suggestion by Western politicians and commentators that Putin had ordered Prigozhin killed as revenge an “absolute lie.”
Although until now there is no official information about when Prigozhin’s burial will take place, this Tuesday the Saint Petersburg authorities reinforced security at the Serafímovskoe cemetery, one of the holy fields where, according to the Fontanka.ru medium, Prigozhin and could be buried. the other deceased from the Wagner Group.
Interestingly, in this historic cemetery established at the beginning of the 20th century in the Primorski district, northwest of Saint Petersburg, also lie the remains of the parents of the Russian president. Putin’s father was a World War II veteran and a survivor of the siege of Leningrad (name of the city in Soviet times).
In the cemetery, metal arches were installed in the morning. From the night of Monday to Tuesday, police officers are guarding all the entrances, and inside the compound “they walk and check every ditch,” reports Fontanka.ru. In the nearby avenues, big traffic jams formed and it took several hours for the traffic to normalize.
