A portrait of the proprietor of personal army firm Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin lays at a casual road memorial close to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 26, 2023.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

cover caption

toggle caption

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

A portrait of the proprietor of personal army firm Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin lays at a casual road memorial close to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 26, 2023.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

MOSCOW — Russia’s Investigative Committee mentioned Sunday that it confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and head of the mercenary power Wagner who led a short-lived armed rise up in opposition to Russia’s army, was killed in a airplane crash.

Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko mentioned in an announcement that forensic and genetic testing recognized all 10 our bodies recovered on the web site of Wednesday’s crash and the findings “conform to the manifest” of the airplane. The assertion did not supply any particulars about what may need precipitated the crash.

Russia’s civil aviation authority earlier this week mentioned Prigozhin, 62, and a few of his prime lieutenants had been on the record of the passengers and crew members on board the airplane. All seven passengers and three crew died when the airplane plummeted from the sky midway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, Prigozhin’s hometown.

Two months in the past, Prigozhin mounted a daylong mutiny in opposition to Russia’s army, main his mercenaries from Ukraine towards Moscow. President Vladimir Putin decried the act as “treason” and vowed punishment for these concerned.

Instead, the Kremlin rapidly lower a take care of Prigozhin to finish the armed revolt, saying he could be allowed to stroll free with out going through any fees and to resettle in Belarus. Questions have remained, nonetheless, about whether or not Prigozhin finally would face a comeuppance for the transient rebellion that posed the largest problem to Putin’s authority of his 23-year rule.

A preliminary U.S. intelligence evaluation concluded that an intentional explosion precipitated the airplane to go down. As suspicions grew that the Russian president was the architect of an assassination, the Kremlin rejected them as a “complete lie.”

One of the Western officers who described the preliminary evaluation mentioned it decided that Prigozhin was “very likely” focused and that an explosion could be in keeping with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics.”

Prigozhin’s second-in-command, Dmitry Utkin, in addition to Wagner logistics mastermind Valery Chekalov, additionally had been killed within the crash. Utkin was lengthy believed to have based Wagner and baptized the group along with his nom de guerre.

The destiny of Wagner, which till just lately performed a distinguished function in Russia’s army marketing campaign in Ukraine and was concerned in quite a few African and Middle Eastern nations, has remained unsure.

After the mutiny, the Kremlin mentioned Prigozhin could be exiled in Belarus, and his fighters had been provided three choices: to observe him there, retire or enlist in Russia’s common military and return to Ukraine, the place Wagner mercenaries had fought alongside Russian troops.

Several thousand Wagner mercenaries opted to maneuver to Belarus, the place a camp was erected for them southeast of the capital, Minsk.