Awaiting the DNA results that identify the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, among the wreckage of the plane that crashed on Wednesday, and despite the fact that Washington and Kyiv suggested Vladimir Putin’s hand in his death, until Thursday morning the Kremlin has not yet ruled on the accident.
A private Embraer Legacy plane, which according to local media was part of the fleet of the best-known of the Russian mercenaries, crashed on Wednesday afternoon in the Tver oblast, some 300 kilometers north of Moscow. According to the Russian civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia, Prigozhin was part of the passenger.
Subsequently, he published a list of the ten people on board, including three crew members. Also listed in it was Prigozhin’s deputy, the Wagner commander Dimitri Utkin. The Ministry of Emergency Situations confirmed on Wednesday night that all had died.
The rescue teams finished recovering the bodies of all of them at dawn, according to a source told the Interfax agency. It is necessary, however, to carry out DNA tests, since they are charred.
The death of Prigozhin and Wagner’s commanders comes two months after their failed rebellion against the Kremlin and the Army’s high command. The coup was resolved after a pact mediated by the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko. Since then, the mercenaries and their bosses had been cut off from the Russian offensive in Ukraine and forced to go into exile in Belarus in exchange for not being prosecuted.
Asked about his reaction to what happened, US President Joe Biden said: “I don’t know exactly what happened, but it doesn’t surprise me. There isn’t much that happens in Russia that Putin isn’t behind. But not I know enough to know the answer.”
In the Ukraine they interpret the death of Prigozhin as a “warning” to the Russian elites. “It is obvious that Putin does not forgive anyone… The demonstrative removal of Prigozhin and Wagner’s command two months after the attempted coup is a signal from Putin to the Russian elites ahead of the 2024 elections. ‘Beware! Disloyalty is equal to death,” he wrote on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
In a statement to CNN, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said that “if it’s true, Putin will eliminate his opponents and that scares anyone who thinks of expressing an opinion different from his.”
Despite these and other criticisms, so far Russia has not shown an official position on the accident that cost Prigozhin’s life.
Hours after knowing what happened, in the early hours of this Thursday admirers and followers began to show their respect to the founder of Wagner. In his hometown of St. Petersburg, a makeshift memorial has been set up outside the former offices of the Wagner Group, where attendees lay flowers, candles and flags in his honor.
In the same building, the lights in the apartments were turned on to reveal the shape of a cross through their windows, according to photographs posted on social networks.
