Wagner PMC Head Yevgeny Prighozin Allegedly Killed In Plane Crash
The head of the Wagner private military corporation, Yevgeny Prighozin, has allegedly died in the Wednesday crash of a business jet owned by the company in Russia.
The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations claims that the Embraer business jet crashed in Russia’s Tver Oblast. Ten individuals including Prighozin were listed as being aboard, with all presumed dead following the crash. The statement carried on TASS and other Russian state media wires followed the spread of a video said to depict the crash of the business jet on social media.
Telegram channels operated by individuals sympathetic to Wagner accuse the Russian military of having shot down the aircraft, with some additionally claiming that Dmitri Utkin, the neo-Nazi founder of Wagner turned right hand man of Prighozin, was also aboard.
United States President Joe Biden has been briefed on the alleged death of Prighozin. In a statement, National Security Spokesperson Adrianne Watson said: “We have seen the reports. If confirmed, no one should be surprised. The disastrous war in Ukraine led to a private army marching on Moscow, and now – it would seem — to this”
The apparent death of Prighozin comes two months after his abortive mutiny against what he claimed to be incompetent Russian military leadership, following a rift where Prighozin blamed Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General Valery Gerasimov for ammunition shortages that resulted in severe casualties among Wagner mercenaries fighting to take the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
Prior to Prighozin’s presumed death, he and Wagner appeared to have avoided major retribution from the Russian state for the mutiny, with Wagner training camps relocated to Belarus and the company allowed to continue recruiting mercenaries for operations in Africa. Prighozin himself released his first public statement since the mutiny on Monday, saying that Wagner was making Russia “even greater on all continents” through its African operations in a video that appeared to have been recorded in one of the African nations Wagner is active in.