At round 5:30 pm Moscow time on August 23, the Embraer Legacy 600 personal enterprise jet took to the skies. Launching from an airport close to the Russian capital, the 13-seater airplane, which has a white physique and blue tail, has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the pinnacle of the brutal Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group.

At 5:46 pm, as soon as the airplane was away from Moscow—an space the place location-tracking GPS signals are frequently blocked—receivers belonging to flight-tracking community Flightradar24 started picking up signals from the Embraer Legacy. For the subsequent 34 minutes, Prigozhin’s airplane was sending out knowledge about its altitude, velocity, and autopilot settings that allowed its movements to be tracked.

During this time, the Embraer Legacy seemed to be tremendous. It reached a cruising altitude of 28,000 ft earlier than briefly climbing to 30,000 ft, and it was touring at round a floor velocity of round 513 knots. Its flight path headed northwest, away from Moscow and within the course of Russia’s second-largest metropolis, St. Petersburg.

At 6:19 pm, round 30 seconds earlier than the airplane stopped transmitting knowledge altogether, it plunged 8,000 ft towards the bottom. Its final recorded altitude was 19,725, because it flew by the Kuzhenkino village within the Tver Region. The descent was “dramatic,” in keeping with Flightradar’s analysis.

Since the airplane smashed into the earth, killing all these onboard, Russian aviation companies, Telegram channels linked to Wagner, and the nation’s state-controlled media have reported that Prigozhin was listed as a passenger. The nation’s aviation company named the Wagner boss amongst 10 folks on the airplane, together with different senior Wagner members, together with cofounder Dmitri Utkin and three crew members.

Officials, in keeping with Russian state media, are investigating the crash and what might have prompted it, and have reportedly recovered the our bodies. It has been broadly speculated that the airplane might have been shot down by Russian air defenses, maybe in response to Prigozhin’s tried coup two months in the past. No proof to again this up has been offered but, with Russian president Vladimir Putin saying he has despatched his condolences to the households of the useless and investigations are trying into what occurred. (One nameless Western intelligence official told The New York Times that they imagine Prigozhin was on the airplane. Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden has said there’s “not a lot that occurs in Russia that Putin’s not behind.“)

Thanks to Russia’s heavy censorship and propaganda machines, the verifiable reality of what occurred to the Embraer Legacy might by no means be recognized, specialists say.

Amid the dramatic and unfolding incident, there was a void of official data and a swirl of unconfirmed theories. However, the occasion highlights how highly effective Russia’s grip on its data area is: The nation controls its media, has banned impartial retailers, and tightly censors the web and on-line companies obtainable within the nation. The episode additionally continues to indicate how helpful even small quantities of open source information—reminiscent of photographs or movies posted to social media and open supply knowledge, reminiscent of flight data—can be in establishing what may have happened. Open supply intelligence, often called OSINT, is already being inspected by researchers.