Wagner Group Boss Alleged Dead

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin—Russian oligarch, mercenary leader, and former confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin—is presumed dead after an Embraer Legacy 600 upon which he was reportedly traveling went down north of Moscow.

Ten people—three crew and seven passengers—are alleged to have perished in the accident.

While Prigozhin’s name appeared on the downed aircraft’s passenger manifest, it has yet to be established that he was, in fact, on board. The presumption is lent plausibility, however, by the fact the lost Legacy jet was owned by Prigozhin.

The mishap follows two-months-to-the-day after Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt against Putin’s government. Speculation abounds that Putin—who’s notoriously and demonstratively intolerant of disloyalty and, in June, accused Prigozhin of “treason”—ordered his one-time adjutant’s aircraft shot down.

Shortly after the Legacy 600’s downing, a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner Group—a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) founded and controlled by Prigozhin and the vehicle by which his coup attempt was orchestrated—reported Prigozhin’s aircraft had been shot down by air defenses in the Tver Oblast, an area of alternating lowlands and highlands some 143-nautical-miles northwest of Moscow.

The same Telegram channel set forth witnesses in the vicinity of the Embraer’s downing reported hearing two “bangs” and observed two vapor-trails before the aircraft came to ground.

Russian news outlets stated the Legacy 600 had been airborne less than half-an-hour prior to its destruction and eight bodies had been recovered from the wreckage.

Prigozhin founded the Wagner Group in 2014. Under his guidance, the organization grew to upwards of fifty-thousand trained warfighters organized in a manner similar to the structure and hierarchy of Russia’s state armed forces.

Evidence suggests the Wagner Group has been used as a proxy by Moscow, affording the Russian state plausible deniability vis-à-vis military operations abroad, thereby obfuscating the true casualties resultant of Russia's foreign interventions.

Coming to prominence shortly after the 2014 commencement of the Donbas War in Ukraine, the Wagner Group has taken part in numerous global conflicts, to include civil wars in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali, often fighting on the sides of forces aligned with the Russian government. Wagner operatives have been accused of murdering, torturing, raping, and robbing civilians—war crimes, all—as well as torturing and killing accused deserters.

The Wagner Group contributed significantly to Russia’s February 2022 mobilization against Ukraine, for which the Group recruited Russian prison inmates for frontline combat.

The 62-year-old Prigozhin headed a 23-24 June 2023 insurrection against Putin’s government, marching Wagner Group personnel from Ukraine, seizing the southern Russian city of Rostov on Don, and threatening to advance on Moscow. The attempted coup has been attributed, in part, to tensions born of Prigozhin’s differences of opinion with Russian military commanders over Putin’s conduct of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

In the end, the inchoate rebellion was quelled by dint of a deal allowing Wagner Group troops to either relocate to Belarus or join the Russian army.

Notwithstanding his culpability in the attempted coup and alleged agreement to relocate his person and household to Belarus, Prigozhin passed the last two months traveling freely throughout Russia. The openness and audacity with which he conducted his post-insurrection affairs compelled Russian political pundits to refer to Prigozhin as a “dead man walking.”

In the days following the Wagner Group coup attempt, Putin referred to Prigozhin’s actions as a “betrayal” and “a stab in the back.”

FMI: www.state.gov