An Wednesday evening reports grew in Russia that Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash. The militia leader who, exactly two months ago, dared to challenge the Russian president directly when he was rehearsing an uprising against the military leadership and ultimately against Vladimir Putin himself. At around 7:20 p.m. local time, Telegram channels said a military plane had crashed in the Twer region. Shortly before 8 p.m., civil protection reported that a private Embraer Legacy plane had crashed in the Tver region, near a village called Kushenkino. All ten people on board died, seven passengers and three crew members. The machine was on its way from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, Prigozhin’s place of residence. Immediately thereafter, the air traffic control authority informed Rozaviazia that the name of Prigozhin was on the passenger list.
Telegram channels said that the plane with registration number RA-02795 belonged to Prigozhin. A Telegram channel with connections to the security forces wrote that Dmitry Utkin, the commander with a penchant for Nazi symbolism, whose combat name gave the name to the Wagner militia and who is said to have killed the column of Prigozhin’s fighters headed for Moscow. It was initially unclear whether that was true. But soon the Petersburg medium “Fontanka” and the well-connected journalist Xenia Sobchak reported that Prigozhin and commanders of the Wagner militia were on board. A representative of the occupiers of southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, annexed by Putin last fall, said he spoke to militia officers who confirmed the deaths of Prigozhin and Utkin. State news agencies initially only wrote that seven or eight bodies had been discovered at the crash site. At 11 p.m. Moscow time, Rozaviatsia published on Telegram a list of the names of the crew and passengers who were “on board” the plane. On it are the names of Prigozchin and Utkin.
Videos of the events quickly made the rounds through Russian Telegram channels. Women filmed the falling plane amid curses, one of them mistaking it for an intercepted drone. The images show a total loss of control on board; Wing parts and the tail of the machine appear to be missing. This was matched by images of an airplane tail that were later circulated; it was apparently found several kilometers from the rest of the wreck. Other images from the ground show the remains of the plane burning. Others show debris with two human corpses lying between them. The Telegram channel “Grey Zone” attributed to Wagner wrote that the plane had been shot down by anti-aircraft guns. Witnesses heard two pops. At 1820 hrs air traffic controllers tried without success to contact the crew. This has not been officially confirmed. Judicial circles said “all versions” would be examined, including pilot errors, technical defects and external influences.
Gray Zone and others pointed out that exactly two months ago, on the evening of June 23, Prigozhin announced his “Justice March”, which turned into an uprising. The Wagner people shot down several combat helicopters and an airplane, and Putin thought of those killed in the Kremlin. But soon it could appear as if the uprising had never happened. Prigozhin, 62, was filmed in Petersburg during Putin’s Africa summit in July, contrary to a deal with the Kremlin that sent him to Belarus. Wagner’s activities in Africa appeared as a way of giving Prigozhin a terrain far from home where he could live out his ambitions and where he would not come into conflict with the Defense Ministry. It was only last Monday that Prigozhin reported back with a short video message, allegedly from “an African country”. Prigozhin, who appeared armed and in camouflage clothing in front of men in pick-up trucks on a sandy plain, had certainly chosen the timing consciously, shortly before the BRICS summit in South Africa.