‘Wagner has been beheaded’: Prigozhin deemed killed in plane crash, authorities confirm
Joel Gehrke
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Russian paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and his top Wagner Group commander died in a plane crash on Wednesday, according to Russian aviation authorities.
“An investigation into the Embraer plane crash that occurred in the Tver region this evening has been launched. Russia’s Federal Agency for Air Transport confirmed,” per state-run Tass. “According to the passenger list, the first and last name of Yevgeny Prigozhin was included in this list.”
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A senior European official surmised to the Washington Examiner that it was an “assassination.”
The incident comes just two months after the longtime Wagner Group chief led his forces in a brief but tumultuous march toward Moscow in June, with the stated goal of ousting Russian defense leaders. That abortive uprising was halted within a day, as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have brokered an agreement to avert a major confrontation, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much-publicized promise of safe passage drew skepticism in Kyiv and trans-Atlantic circles.
“It is obvious that Putin does not forgive anyone for his own bestial terror … and he was waiting for the moment,” Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is also obvious that Prigozhin signed a special death warrant for himself the moment he believed in Lukashenko’s bizarre ‘guarantees’ and Putin’s equally absurd ‘word of honor.’ The demonstrative elimination of Prigozhin and the Wagner command two months after the coup attempt is a signal from Putin to Russia’s elites ahead of the 2024 elections.”
Podolyak offered that assessment despite acknowledging “it is worth waiting for the fog of war to disappear,” but other officials were even more hesitant to draw conclusions about such a high-profile incident in “the empire of lies,” as one senior lawmaker put it.
“If Muscovites start to kill each other and eat each other, why should we focus [on them]?” Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Zygimantas Pavilionis told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of it usually is fake, from both sides. It might be Prigozhin faking. It might be Russians faking. … They live on lying. They exist on lying.”
Yet other Western policymakers took the statements from Russian aviation authorities as an unmistakable signal.
“The speed at which the Russian Govt has confirmed Yevgeny Prigozhin was on a plane that crashed on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg should tell us everything we need to know,” senior British lawmaker Alicia Kearns, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, wrote on social media. “Reports Russian Air Defence shot down the plane suggests Putin is sending a very loud message.”
The destruction of Prigozhin’s plane occurred hours later, setting off frenzied speculation, even as Western officials acknowledged uncertainty about what had happened.
“You may recall, when I was asked about this by you, I said I’d be careful what I rode in. I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised,” President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday, according to a pool report. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind. But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”
The crash occurred on a red-letter day inside the Russian and Ukrainian societies, not least because it is two months to the day since Prigozhin launched his “armed mutiny.” It is also one day before the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union and the day of the third annual Crimea Platform meeting — a diplomatic gathering focused on Kyiv’s intent to reclaim Crimea, a strategically vital peninsula Putin annexed in 2014.
Prigozhin had continued to send his own messages in the months since the coup. He attended Putin’s Africa summit last month and struck a pose as a patriotic power broker despite his late insubordination.
“PMC Wagner … makes Russia even greater on all continents and Africa more free,” Prigozhin said in a video published this week. “We’re recruiting real heroes and continue to carry out the tasks that have been set and that we promised to deal with.”
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The plane went down the same day Russian authorities confirmed the sacking of Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who disappeared following Prigozhin’s uprising amid an apparent Kremlin effort to identify complicit military officials. Wagner Group Cmdr. Dmitry Utkin also was reported to have been on the plane.
“Wagner has been beheaded,” a pro-war telegram channel, VChK-OGPU, assessed in a post on the crash.