Yevgueni Prigozhin lived a good part of his life in the shadows, and his last goodbye could not have been any other way. The head of the Wagner Group, whose plane crashed on August 23, was buried this Tuesday in St. Petersburg in the most absolute secrecy.
“The farewell to Yevgeny Viktorovich took place in a closed format. Those who wish to say goodbye can visit the Porokhovskoe cemetery,” his press service announced in an afternoon statement.
The place and time of the funeral for Prigozhin had not been announced earlier.
Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov said hours before that the Russian Presidency did not have that information. The decision about the funeral of Prigozhin and other employees of the Wagner Group is something to be made by their relatives and friends, he said.
The Russian president’s press secretary also ruled out the presence of Vladimir Putin at the funeral of Prigozhin, his ally for years but leader two months ago of the failed armed rebellion that put Putin in trouble.
This Tuesday the funerals for Prigozhin’s lieutenants who died last week in the same air disaster also began in St. Petersburg under tight security and secrecy measures.
Under tight security and secrecy, the first member of the Wagnerite leadership to be buried was Valeri Chekalov, Prigozhin’s head of security, Fontanka.ru reported. The ceremony took place at the Severnoe Cemetery. This medium also claimed that the funeral for Dimitri Utkin, Wagner’s first commander and co-founder of the mercenary army, was being prepared for the same day.
Prigozhin and his lieutenants died last Wednesday, August 23, in a private Embraer Legacy jet flying from Moscow to Saint Petersburg that crashed near the town of Kuzhenkino, in Tver Oblast, 300 kilometers northwest of the city. Russian capital. On board were ten people, including three crew members.
On Sunday, the Investigation Committee, which is in charge of investigating major crimes, reported that the forensic tests and DNA analyzes had been completed, and that they had confirmed the death of the mercenary chief and several of his lieutenants.
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 so as not to be prosecuted for the uprising.
Peskov called the suggestion by Western politicians and commentators that Putin had ordered Prigozhin’s death as revenge for his disloyalty an “absolute lie.”
The cause of the accident is currently unknown. According to the RBK newspaper, the Investigative Committee is investigating whether the pilot made a mistake, whether there was a mechanical failure or whether it was an external cause that caused the plane to crash.
The authorities of Saint Petersburg reinforced the security in several cemeteries of the second city of Russia. One of them, that of Serafímovskoe, which Fontanka.ru pointed out as Prigozhin’s possible last home.
Interestingly, in this historic cemetery established at the beginning of the 20th century in the Primorski district, northwest of Saint Petersburg, 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 Monday night to Tuesday, police officers were guarding all the entrances, and inside the compound “they walk and check every ditch,” Fontanka.ru reported. In the nearby streets and avenues, large traffic jams formed and it took several hours for the traffic to normalize.
