HE'S A PRIGONER
Test confirm Vlad foe dead
Russia confirmed Sunday that Yevgeny Prigozhin — the founder and head of the Wagner mercenary group who attempted to lead a rebellion against Moscow’s military — was killed in a fiery plane crash last week.
Forensic and genetic testing identified all 10 bodies recovered from the site of Wednesday’s crash, near Moscow, and determined they belonged to those listed on the flight log, Svetlana Petrenko, a spokesperson for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said in a statement.
Prigozhin, 62, and some of his top lieutenants were listed as passengers and crew aboard the business jet, which went down less than 30 minutes into its journey to St. Petersburg. There were no survivors.
The statement did not offer any details about what might have caused the crash.
The Embraer aircraft burst into flames on impact, officials told the state-run media TASS, which has been accused of spreading Russian propaganda during the war with Ukraine.
Coup consequences
The crash took place just two days after Prigozhin shared his first video address since his failed attempt at a coup two months ago.
During the June 24 incident, Prigozhin led his mercenaries toward Moscow in an armed revolt before calling it all off about 100 miles before reaching the capital.
The move, which was condemned by Russian President Vladimir Putin as “treason,” led to Prigozhin’s exile to Belarus.
Though he was deemed a “traitor” following the attempted coup, Putin later labeled Prigozhin a “talented businessman” who had a “difficult fate.”
“It is always a tragedy,” Putin said of his former ally in televised comments Thursday. “I knew Prigozhin for many years, since the beginning of the 1990s. He was a person with a complicated background.
“He made serious mistakes in his life and he achieved the necessary results, both for himself and, when I asked him, for the common cause, as during the past few months,” he added.
The Russian leader also expressed condolences to other Wagner fighters who died in the fiery crash.
“Indeed, if they were there and, according to the initial information, Wagner Company employees were on board, I want to note that those people made a significant contribution to our common cause of fighting the Nazi regime in Ukraine,” Putin said.
Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion was the biggest threat to the strongman’s grip on power in decades, and fueled speculation that Putin had orchestrated the aviation disaster, which US officials believed was caused by an onboard explosion.
Speculation had also been growing, prior to Sunday’s statement, that Prigozhin may have evaded the fiery fate.
The false death report wouldn’t have been the first, as Prigozhin was previously reported dead in July following an alleged meeting with Putin over Wagner’s botched rebellion. He once faked his own death in Africa in 2019 before showing his face again three days later.