Vladimir Putin has confirmed the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, saying the Wagner chief had made some made “some serious mistakes” and met with a “difficult fate”, as speculation grew his plane was brought down by a bomb after it took off from Moscow.
US and western officials said it was likely that an intentional explosion had brought down the plane, which crashed into a field 185 miles (300km) north of of the Russian capital.
“A definitive conclusion has not been reached, but an explosion is the leading theory of what caused the plane to crash in a field between Moscow and St Petersburg,” the New York Times quoted the officials as saying. “The explosion could have been caused by a bomb or other device planted on the aircraft,” they said.
The Pentagon said the US believed Prigozhin had been killed but did not give any specifics other than to deny the plane had been hit by a surface-to-air missile.
“Our initial assessment is that it’s likely Prigozhin was killed,” spokesperson Brig Gen Pat Ryder said. “We’re continuing to assess the situation. We don’t have any information to indicate right now the press reporting stating that there was some type of surface-to-air missile that took down the plane. We assess that information to be inaccurate.”
In a meeting at the Kremlin, Putin addressed Wednesday’s crash of Prigozhin’s business jet for the first time, offering “sincere condolences” to the families of the 10 people on board, including Prigozhin.
“I have known Prigozhin for a long time, since the 1990s. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved the necessary results for himself but also for the greater good when I asked him. He was a talented man, a talented businessman,” the Russian leader said, speaking about the warlord in the past tense.
Putin added that Prigozhin’s Wagner group “made a significant contribution to the fight against nazism in Ukraine”.
“We remember this, know this, and won’t forget it,” he said.
Putin said he was told that Prigozhin had returned from Africa earlier on Wednesday, shortly before his apparent death, and had held meetings with officials in Moscow. He said that Russian investigators would pursue the investigation into the crash “to the end”.
The Russian leader made his comments during a televised meeting with Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed leader of the occupied Donetsk region.
Earlier in the day, Wagner fighters and a few dozen members of the public had gathered at a makeshift memorial for Yevgeny Prigozhin in his home town of St Petersburg.
Footage of the memorial set up outside Wagner’s headquarters in the city showed men in military camouflage on Thursday laying flowers on the ground in front of portraits of Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, a close Prigozhin ally often described as the founder of the mercenary group, who was also named on the passenger list.
In one clip, a fighter in full military garb can be seen falling to his knees and weeping.
“I am here to honour the memory of Prigozhin … I support his politics, Wagner is just,” said one young man standing outside the memorial on Wednesday evening in an interview published by the Russian Sota outlet.
Meanwhile, crash investigators in Kuzhenkino, in Russia’s Tver region, picked through the wreckage of a jet that officials said had been carrying Prigozhin and had crashed with no survivors.
One resident, Vitaly Stepenok, 72, told Reuters he heard an “explosion or a bang” before seeing the jet plummet to the ground.
“Usually, if an explosion happens on the ground then you get an echo, but it was just a bang and I looked up and saw white smoke,” Stepenok said. “One wing flew off in one direction and the fuselage went like that,” he said, gesturing with his arms to show the plane heading down towards the ground. “And then it glided down on one wing. It didn’t nose-dive, it was gliding.”
Another villager, who gave his name as Anatoly, said: “In terms of what might have happened, I’ll just say this: it wasn’t thunder, it was a metallic bang – let’s put it that way. I’ve heard things like that before.”
Russian authorities said on Thursday that the investigation into the crash would be led by Ivan Sibul, a veteran investigator who has previously examined other high-profile plane crashes.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said Kyiv had nothing to do with the presumed death of Prigozhin. The Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Zelenskiy telling journalists on Thursday: “We had nothing to do with it. Everybody realises who has something to do with it.”
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“I can’t say anything good about these subhumans,” Zelenskiy added. “It’s either a judgment at The Hague, or God’s judgment.”
The Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said the plane crash on Wednesday evening – two months after Wagner forces marched on Moscow – was “a signal from Putin to Russia’s elites ahead of the 2024 elections. ‘Beware! Disloyalty equals death.’”
Those sentiments were echoed by the Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak, whose father Vladimir Putin once described as his mentor. “Absolutely clear signal to all the elites, in fact, to everyone who had any seditious thoughts,” she said on Telegram.
State television gave the crash limited coverage on Thursday, while prominent propagandists largely urged Russians to wait on the result of the investigation.
There has been no confirmation yet on whether Prigozhin’s body has been identified. Bodies that were found at the crash site were driven to the morgue of a forensic medical examination bureau in the city of Tver, according to the St Petersburg outlet Fontanka. A source in the morgue told Fontanka “there were signs” that Prigozhin was among the dead, but added that the body in question was badly damaged after the crash.
Baza, a news outlet with close ties to security services, said the bodies of the victims were sent to Moscow for genetic analysis.
Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in part of southern Zaporizhzhia, said on the Telegram app that a member of the Wagner group had identified Prigozhin’s body by a missing part of his finger on his left hand.
Several social media channels close to Prigozhin have issued tributes, with one main channel appearing to pin the blame on the Russian authorities despite some circumspection elsewhere in the aftermath of the crash to declare that the Kremlin-connected businessman was definitively present on the plane.
“Prigozhin died as the result of the actions of Russia’s traitors,” wrote the Grey Zone, a social media outlet close to Wagner. “But even in hell, he’ll be the best! Glory to Russia!”
Marat Gabidullin, a former Wagner commander and assistant to Prigozhin, said he had “no reason to believe that Prigozhin was still alive”. “I don’t have any indication that it wasn’t him on the plane. My contacts at Wagner also say he died.”
At the Pentagon, Ryder said Wagner had been a spent force in Ukraine since its attempted uprising.
“The Wagner forces essentially were Russia’s most effective combat forces on the battlefield … but for all intents and purposes, their combat effectiveness has been diminished and they are no longer a significant factor when it comes to the conflict inside Ukraine,” he said. “Clearly we know that the Wagner group has for a while been conducting operations with many tentacles, some military in nature, some criminal in nature, in Africa and places like Burkina Faso and Mali, and I don’t think anybody’s going to discount the potential for danger when it comes to that group or the remnants of that group.”