Putin speaks out on plane crash that killed 10 including Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin
The Wagner chief was on the passenger list but it wasn't immediately clear if he was on board after a private jet carrying ten crashed near Moscow
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, two months after he staged a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He and six top Wagner lieutenants were reportedly on a business jet that crashed on Wednesday soon after taking off from Moscow, with a crew of three, Russia's civil aviation agency said.
Rescuers quickly found all ten bodies, and Russian media said sources in Prigozhin's Wagner private military company confirmed his death - though this has not been independently verified.
However, officials believe the plane crash was likely to have been intentionally caused by an explosion, AP sources have said.
In a televised address, President Putin expressed his condolences to the families of the dead and said that investigators will begin looking into the incident.
Speaking to his long association with Prigozhin, Putin called him a talented businessman but also alluded to the Wagner chief's recent attempted coup.
He said: "This was a person with a complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in life, but also sought to achieve the necessary results - both for himself and at time when I asked him to, for the common cause, such as in these recent months."
Rosaviatsia, the Russian government's Federal Air Transport Agency, posted a list of seven passengers and three crew members who it said were aboard the plane "according to the airline."
The private jet crashed en route from Moscow to St Petersburg, some 185 miles north of the Russian capital.
Other unconfirmed media reports said the jet belonged to the founder of the Wagner private military company.
Flight tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press showed a private jet registered to Wagner, which Prigozhin had used previously, took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening.
Minutes later its transponder signal was lost in a rural region with no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.
Police cordoned off the field where the plane crashed as investigators studied the site.
Blacked out vans were seen on Russian media driving the bodies to the Tver Regional Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination, for testing and to be identified.
The country's state news agency TASS also said Russia’s Federal Agency for Air Transport has launched an investigation into the crash.
Details of the plane's crash
The plane took off from Moscow and began sending data from 2.46pm local time (1:46pm BST). It was cruising at 28,000 feet.
Between 3pm and 3.20pm the plane was still sending out signals, according to tracking system flight radar.
The site said the aircraft was not transmitting position information but other data like altitude, speed, vertical rate, and autopilot settings were broadcast.
At this time, flight radar reports the aircraft began ascending and descending between 27,500 feet and 30,100 feet.
The flight rapidly drops at around 3.11pm as shown below in the chart.
Videos shared by the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone showed a plane dropping from a large cloud of smoke.
It twisted as it fell and one of its wings appeared to be missing.
A freefall like that typically occurs when an aircraft sustains severe damage, and it seems there was an explosion mid-flight.
Who else was on the plane?
Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency released the names of two pilots and one flight attendant who were on board Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's private jet, CNN reports.
Citing the airline, the agency gave the names of the lost crew as:
Captain Aleksei Levshin
Co-Pilot Rustam Karimov
Flight Attendant Kristina Raspopova
Earlier, the Federal Air Transport Agency shared the names of the passengers it said were on board, in addition to Prigozhin. They were named as:
Sergey Propustin
Evgeniy Makaryan
Aleksandr Totmin
Valeriy Chekalov, a senior aide to Prigozhin designated by the US Treasury for acting "for or on behalf of Prigozhin and has facilitated shipments of munitions to the Russian Federation"
Dmitriy Utkin, a trusted lieutenant of Prigozhin's since the beginning of the Wagner Group
Nikolay Matuseev
The Wagner group's reaction
At Wagner's headquarters in St Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross.
Prigozhin's supporters brought red carnation flowers, flags and candles to the building to create a memorial.
While countless theories about the events swirled, most observers saw Prigozhin's death as Putin's punishment for the most serious challenge to his authority of his 23-year rule.
Prigozhin's supporters claimed the plane was deliberately downed and suggested it could have been hit by an air defense missile or targeted by a bomb on board, on pro-Wagner messaging app channels.
These claims could not be independently verified.
Where is Putin and what has the Kremlin said?
Russia's leader Putin has so far been silent about the fatal crash.
On Thursday, he addressed the BRICS summit in Johannesburg via videolink, talking about expanding cooperation among the group’s members.
He didn’t mention the crash and the Kremlin made no comment about it.
Putin was not able to attend as the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him in March for the abduction of children from Ukraine.
As news of the crash broke, Putin appeared calm while speaking at an event commemorating the WWII Battle of Kursk and hailing the heroes of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russian state media also have not covered it extensively, instead focusing on the summit and the invasion of Ukraine.
The Western world puts the blame on Russia
Christopher Steele, who previously ran the MI6 Russia desk, told Sky News: “I would suspect very much that it was an FSB or GRU operation (Russia's security service or part of its military)."
He also noted the plane crash came a day after Prigozhin's ally General (Sergei) Surovikin was sacked from his job as head of security of Russia, describing the events as what looks like part of a “pattern of state-backed activity”.
US and other Western officials long expected Putin to go after the Wagner leader, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the June 23-24 mutiny.
“I don’t know for a fact what happened but I’m not surprised,” US President Joe Biden said. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
While acknowledging that the facts were still unclear, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said: "It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising.
“We know this pattern… in Putin’s Russia - deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also pointed the finger.
“We have nothing to do with this. Everyone understands who does,” he said.
Janis Sarts, director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told Latvian television that the downing of the plane "was certainly no mere coincidence".
What will happen to the Wagner group now and what did they do in the lead up to the crash?
Prigozhin had founded the Wagner group in 2014. It's a mercenary group, which is illegal in Russia, so it was registered as a "private military company" in 2022.
They were fighting alongside Russia's army in Ukraine but then mounted a short-lived armed mutiny against the country's military leadership in late June.
The Kremlin said he would be exiled to Belarus, and his fighters would either retire, follow him there, or join the Russian military.
This week, Prigozhin posted his first recruitment video since the mutiny, saying Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free.”
He appeared to have made a quick trip to Mali, where his private military company operates in support of government forces against jihadist groups.
But now that the Wagner group's leader and multiple other top officials have died, it seems unlikely the group would be able to operate as it has been.
"They can forget about the Africa project,” Marat Gabidullin, a former Wagner mercenary, told The Times.
“Wagner has been decapitated,” said Ksenia Sobchak, a journalist and socialite whose father was President Putin’s political mentor in the 1990s, the Times reported.
Numerous opponents and critics of Putin have been killed or gravely sickened in apparent assassination attempts.
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