Mercenary Chief Prigozhin on Passenger List of Doomed Russian Jet

The business jet, which crashed some 60 miles north of Moscow, had 10 on board, authorities say. Prigozhin led an aborted military uprising against the Putin regime in June.

AP, file
The owner of the Wagner Group military company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery, Moscow, Russia, April 8, 2023. AP, file

MOSCOW — A business jet en route to Saint Petersburg from Moscow crashed Wednesday, killing all 10 people on board, Russian emergency officials said. Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list, officials said, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was on board.

Unconfirmed press reports said the jet belonged to Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company.

Russia’s civilian aviation regulator, Rosaviatsia, said Prigozhin was on the passenger list. However, it was not immediately clear if he had boarded the flight.

Russia’s state news agency Tass cited emergency officials as saying that the plane carried three pilots and seven passengers. The authorities said they were investigating the crash, which occurred in the Tver region more than 60 miles north of Moscow.

The Wagner group chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, and President Putin, outside St. Petersburg, on September 20, 2010.
Prigozhin and Putin in 2010. Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, file

Flight tracking data reviewed by the Associated Press shows a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.

The signal was lost in a rural region where there are no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.

Prigozhin, whose private military force Wagner fought alongside Russia’s regular army in Ukraine, mounted a short-lived armed mutiny against Russia’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.

Shortly after that, Wagner fighters set up camp in Belarus, but Prigozhin’s plane, according to media reports, was flying back and forth between Belarus and Russia.

This week, Prigozhin posted his first recruitment video since the mutiny, saying that Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free.”


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