Flight List
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Russian aviation authorities confirm that Wagner PMC chief Evgeny Prighozin was on the flight list of a private jet that crashed near Moscow
The head of the Wagner Private Military Company, Evgeny Prigozhin, was listed among the passengers scheduled to fly on a private jet which crashed on Wednesday in Russia’s Tver Region, the country’s federal air transport agency has confirmed.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry said all 10 people on board the private jet, traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, had died.“ The Embraer plane was flying out of Sheremetyevo to St. Petersburg. There were three crew and seven passengers on board. They all died,” an official told TASS.
Smoke after a plane crash in the Tver region. © photo of an eyewitness
The crash happened near the village of Kuzhenkino in the northwestern Tver Region.
Several short clips published by the Mash and Baza Telegram channels appear to show the Embraer Legacy 600 jet plummeting toward the ground in a seemingly uncontrolled spin. Black smoke can be seen coming out of the plane, although it is unclear which part of the aircraft had caught fire.One of the clips also shows the wreckage of the plane lying in a field and engulfed in flames. A large plume of black smoke can be seen billowing over the crash site.
Embraer Legacy 600
Some Russian outlets have identified the plane as an Embraer Legacy 600, with the tail number RA-02795, which is believed to belong to Prigozhin. However, this was not confirmed by officials.
Rosaviatsiya, the Russian federal air transport agency, said Prigozhin’s name was on the passenger manifest. Eight bodies have been recovered so far, officials told RIA Novosti.
Rosaviatsiya said it has established a special commission to investigate the cause and circumstances of the incident. It identified the airplane as the Embraer-135BJ private jet, owned by the company MNT-Aero.
There was no official comment from the Kremlin or the Russian Defence Ministry on the fate of Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group and a self-declared enemy of the army’s leadership over what he argued was its incompetent prosecution of the special military operation in Ukraine.
A Telegram channel linked to Wagner, Grey Zone, pronounced him dead however, and hailed him as a hero and a patriot who it said had died at the hands of unidentified people it called “traitors to Russia.”
Amid fevered speculation and an absence of verifiable facts, some of his supporters pointed the finger of blame at the Russian state; others at Ukraine which was due to mark its independence day on Thursday.
Founder of Wagner private mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves a cemetery before the funeral of Russian military blogger Maxim Fomin widely known by the name of Vladlen Tatarsky, who was recently killed in a bomb attack in a St Petersburg cafe, in Moscow, Russia, April 8, 2023. REUTERS/Yulia Morozova/File Photo
U.S. President Joe Biden said to reporters in Lake Tahoe. “I don’t know for a fact what happened. But I’m not surprised… There is not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer.”
Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA operations officer who served as the agency’s Moscow station chief “I don’t have any doubt that it was on Putin’s orders.”
He said he believed that Prigozhin was not arrested after his failed mutiny “to give him a kind of false sense of security, freedom of movement, so they could snipe him.”
Impromptu memorial near Wagner PMC headquarters in St Petersburg
“This is about regime security for Vladimir Putin. You cannot allow a guy you called a traitor in late June, when he launched a mutiny, to live. That’s just not going to happen. And Prigozhin, whose formative experience was as a hotdog salesman, probably had an inflated opinion of his staying power.”
“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. Reports Russian Air Defence shot down the plane suggests Putin is sending a very loud message.” British lawmaker Alicia Kearns, chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee wrote on social media platform X.
Source Reuters/TASS/Telegram/RT
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