For the second time in two months, Wagner boss and businessman Evgeny Prigozhin has garnered international headlines, this time after his Embraer Legacy 600 business jet, traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, went down near a remote village in the Tver region, about 300 km from the Russian capital, killing everyone onboard.
Who Was Evgeny Prigozhin?
Prigozhin, 62 at the time of his presumed death, became a media sensation in Russia in 2022, when his private military company, Wagner Group, sent its well-trained, well-equipped, and experienced fighters into battle in the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine.
Launching a national recruitment campaign, Wagner helped the Russian military during the difficult first months of the crisis, after Kiev and its US and NATO patrons rejected a peace deal and made clear that the West’s goal would be to "weaken" Russia militarily, if not institute outright regime change, by pumping tens of billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine. In May 2023, Wagner fighters and Russian Army troops liberated Artemovsk (also known as Bakhmut), a Donbass city reduced to ruins in over eight months of brutal street-to-street and house-to-house fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces. The Artemovsk operation tied down and destroyed tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenaries as Russia built up its reserves and military production was ramped up, and, ultimately, helped the military prepare defenses in Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson for Kiev’s summer offensive, which is now on the verge of complete collapse.
In late June, Prigozhin became an overnight international celebrity after his men launched a mutiny. The PMC boss, who had a long and storied feud with the Defense Ministry centered on complaints about a lack of weapons and logistical support, accused the military of deliberately attacking Wagner's camps, and demanded the ouster of its senior leadership. The MoD denied Prigozhin and Wagner's charges, stressing they "do not correspond to reality."
The mutiny was ultimately defused by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who held hours of back-and-forth negotiations between the Russian leadership and Prigozhin, with the PMC chief ultimately agreeing that his men would stop their march on Moscow and relocate to Belarus. There, Lukashenko said, the fighters would help train the Belarusian Army, accounting for their vast experience in conditions of modern warfare.
For the next two months, the situation seemed to have been resolved peacefully, with Wagner forces setting up shop in Belarus, and Prigozhin traveling back and forth between Russia and Belarus and further afield.
What Happened to Prigozhin on August 23?
On the evening of August 23, at 6:11 pm Moscow time, an Embraer jet carrying seven passengers and three crew went down in the Tver region. The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations soon confirmed that names of Prigozhin and his deputy Dmitry Utkin (call sign "Wagner") were on the plane’s passenger manifest, and said that according to preliminary data, everyone onboard was killed, with eight of ten bodies found.
Russian aviation authorities and law enforcement launched probes.
On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee indicated that the remains of all 10 persons on board the plane had been found, its flight recorders recovered, and that molecular genetic examinations were underway to identify the victims.
How Did Putin React to Prigozhin's Plane Crash?
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the plane crash during a meeting with Donetsk People’s Republic head Denis Pushilin.
Praising the Wagner Group's "significant contribution to our common cause of fighting the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine," Putin said Prigozhin was "a man with a difficult fate," someone who had "made serious mistakes," but also helped Russia after being asked "to do so for the common cause, as in these last months." The Russian president stressed that there would be "no doubt" that the Investigative Committee would carry through its probe into the crash to its conclusion.
How Did Lukashenko Respond?
Lukashenko commented on the plane crash at length on Friday, once again evoking the personal role he played in defusing the Wagner mutiny, revealing that he and Prigozhin never discussed the issue of personal security, and ruling out claims circulating in Western media that Putin was responsible for the incident. Lukashenko also confirmed that a core force of about 10,000 Wagner fighters would remain in Belarus.
Lukashenko also revealed that he had received “very serious information” earlier this summer about a potential attempt against Prigozhin’s life, and provided this information to Putin and Russian Federal Security Service chief Alexander Bortnikov. Later, in a conversation with Prigozhin, Lukashenko said the Wagner chief confirmed to him that Putin had relayed the information about a possible plot against the businessman’s life.
Furthermore, Lukashenko stressed, although Putin wasn't a "madman" who would be foolish enough to carry out such a provocation, especially in such a "sloppy, unprofessional" manner, he would surely "be blamed for it anyway [...] The West has started shouting. Others started singing along that Putin is evil and vindictive," the Belarusian leader stressed.
What Accusations Have Western Leaders Spread, and How Credible are They?
Sure enough, just as they could barely conceal their delight at the beginning of the June 23-24 mutiny, expecting it to weaken Russia's positions at the front, Western leaders have come out of the woodwork to blame Putin.
It started with media speculation by a major US news agency "citing US officials speaking on condition of anonymity" that Prighozin’s plane may have been blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. This theory was later ruled out, and by the Pentagon, no less, with a spokesman calling the missile theory "inaccurate."
Footage showing the fuselage of the plane falling from the sky almost completely intact (apart from its tail section) gave rise to theories of sabotage from on board the jet, a theory which Lukashenko also said seemed credible.
"I don't know for a fact what happened, but I am not surprised," President Biden said Wednesday almost immediately after the incident, before even a preliminary probe could be finished. "There's not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer," Biden added.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock similarly took a conspiratorial tack aimed at Putin, saying "it is no accident that the world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced former confidant of Putin suddenly, literally falls from the sky two months after he attempted a mutiny. We know this pattern in Putin's Russia: deaths, dubious suicides, falls from windows, all which remain unclarified – that underlines a dictatorial power system that is built on violence.”
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau echoed Baerbock’s approach, alleging that "it so happens that political opponents whom Vladimir Putin considers a threat to his power do not die naturally."
Rau did not elaborate on how Prigozhin, who stressed repeatedly even throughout the Wagner mutiny in June that he respected Putin’s authority as commander in chief, squares with her assessment of him being a "political opponent" of the Russian president.
The British and French governments took a curiously different tack, with Cabinet Minister Nick Gibb urging the state to "avoid jumping to conclusions," and saying that authorities "will have more to say once our assessment of is has happened, and conversations with allies reach clear conclusions."
A French government spokesman characterized Prigozhin as "the man who did Putin’s dirty work," and claimed that "what he has done is inseparable from the policies of Putin, who gave him responsibility to carry out abuses as the head of Wagner."
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the West's "speculation" around the incident, characterizing Western assertions of Putin’s possible involvement as "an absolute lie," and emphasizing that additional details would have to be clarified in the course of an ongoing investigation. "As soon as any official conclusions are ready for publication, they will be published," he said.
In an Information Age, Truth Will Out
"I personally don’t know who did it. But…I know Putin. I know how scrupulous, careful, delicate he is. I don't believe he would do such a thing. And another point. It is madness for a head of state. He is no madman. I am far from calling him white and fluffy. He has a dirty job. I am not saying he is white and fluffy, but I know that he will be blamed for everything," Lukashenko said in his remarks Friday.
But fortunately, Lukashenko added, "no matter how it happened, whatever happened, time will tell. Time will pass and we will learn everything. It is impossible to hide it nowadays… Nobody needs sloppy work. Nobody does things that way. But there is a war going on there now. All kinds of people are involved. This is why it is necessary to clarify things first."
Solid advice from the Belarusian leader.