Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a failed uprising against the Kremlin exactly two months ago, was on board a plane that crashed on Wednesday, according to Russian officials – raising questions as to exactly how the disaster occurred.
The crash took place northwest of Moscow and killed all on board, said Russia’s aviation agency, apparently including Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary group that gained prominence for its brutal methods worldwide and its battleground victories in the Ukraine war.
Here’s what we know so far:
What happened?
The plane was a private Embraer jet carrying seven passengers and three crew members, according to Russia’s emergency services ministry.
It had departed from Moscow and was en route to St. Petersburg when it crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino, in Russia’s western Tver region, Russian officials said. Flight data shows the plane reached an altitude of some 28,000 feet before it suddenly stopped transmitting tracking details.
The bodies of eight people have been found at the crash site, according to Russian state media. The official state news agency TASS reported the plane “burned up” on impact. It had been in the air for about half an hour.
“Upon freefall, the Embraer plane wreckage broke apart across a 2 km area away from the village [Kuzhenkino] where most of the fuselage wreckage was found,” state media outlet Russia 24 reported Thursday. “The majority of the wreckage fell near agricultural enterprises.”
Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti also reported Thursday that one of the fragments of the plane was lying on the entry road into Kuzhenkino, where police had set up a cordon, with several special services cars parked nearby.
Video published by RIA Novosti showed a plane plummeting with one wing missing. CNN is unable to confirm the authenticity of the video, but RIA Novosti claimed it was the moment that an Embraer jet fell from the sky over the Tver region.
A woman from Kuzhenkino told RIA Novosti she heard the sound of an airplane near her house on Wednesday evening, that was “something like a bang, like a shot.”
She continued: “Then suddenly an explosion, I looked up and heard a sound above me – it was like pops, like several explosions.
“The plane started to swerve. Then a plume of smoke emerged and the plane began to descend, to dive.”
After the plane fell from the sky, residents told the state media outlet that a black cloud was visible. Lyudmila Osypova told RIA Novosti that “a neighbor ran up to me, her hands were shaking. When we got to the window, I saw only one mushroom cloud, like a black cloud.”
The woman clarified that she did not see the moment of the crash with her own eyes, but the neighbor claimed that she had. “She said that it was terrifying. There was a loud bang, and then she turned her head to look and the whole plane was in sparkles of fire, it was all lit up. Said they saw it caught fire and began to fall,” Osypova added.
It’s not yet clear what caused the plane to crash. Russian authorities said they were investigating and conducting search operations.
“It’s coming down quickly in a spin, and it’s trailing a lot of smoke. So, this is an aircraft that was on fire. And it looks like some structural pieces, aerodynamic surfaces, were missing,” veteran science and aerospace reporter Miles O’Brien told CNN after reviewing footage of the plane’s fall.
“An aircraft like this … they just don’t catastrophically drop out of the sky without something very unusual happening,” he said.
An event like this could be caused by an explosion either inside or outside the aircraft, O’Brien added – like an explosive going off on board, or the aircraft being hit by a missile.
David Soucie, a former safety inspector with the US Federal Aviation Administration, echoed this possibility, saying the plane’s fall looked like it had only one wing left.
Speaking to CNN, US officials cautioned that it was too early to draw any conclusions about the cause, but several possibilities are being evaluated, including an on-board explosive device causing the crash.
At the same time, people familiar with the intelligence do believe that the downing of the plane was deliberate and that the goal was to kill Prigozhin.
Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Thursday that the Defense Department believes that the Wagner chief was indeed killed in the crash, adding that the Pentagon “doesn’t have any information to indicate right now” that the plane Prigozhin was on was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
Was Prigozhin on board?
Prigozhin and several top Wagner lieutenants were named on a list of passengers shared by Russia’s aviation agency.
A Telegram channel linked to Wagner, which had previously carried the group’s propaganda videos, also issued a statement saying Prigozhin had been killed. CNN is unable to confirm the claim.
Other channels associated with Prigozhin and Wagner, including his official Telegram channel, have remained silent.
But there are other clues linking the warlord and the crash.
Another video released by RIA Novosti purports to show the crash site, where the last four digits of a registration number are visible on the plane engine debris: 2795. Prigozhin’s plane, linked to his companies and the Wagner group, is registered as RA-02795.
The crew commander of the Embraer plane was an experienced pilot who started his career flying multipurpose L-410 twin-engine short-range aircraft, his wife told the Russian state TV channel RT.
Svetlana Levshina – who said she learned of the apparent death of her husband, Alexei Levshin, through the media – told RT he had been educated at the Sasovsky Civil Aviation Flight School in the Ryazan region and the St. Petersburg Academy of Civil Aviation. He also worked on the Antonov An-2, she said.
