(AmericanProsperity.com) – Russia’s aviation agency Rosaviatsiya announced on August 23 that Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was aboard the plane that fatally crashed in the country’s Tver Region. According to the state-controlled news agency TASS, the country’s Emergencies Ministry sent an email where it notified that the ten people who were in the Embraer business jet died in the accident.
In a statement, the Kremlin said that the jet was flying to St. Petersburg from the Russian capital Moscow. Russia’s Air Transport Agency said it will launch an in-depth investigation into the accident, and said it’s working to collect evidence about the condition of the plane, as well as the route’s meteorological situation and the ground radio equipment.
According to the Wager-affiliated Telegram channel Grey Zone, the jet disappeared from radar at the “18:20 hours” local time. Apparently, the dispatchers tried to make contact with the aircraft’s crew, after which Russian traffic controllers contacted the Defense Ministry.
During an interview with TASS, Flightradar24’s Ian Petchenik told the news agency that “whatever happened” in the jet, it “happened quickly.” He also noted that the accident was surprising as there wasn’t any indication that the aircraft had something wrong before falling from the sky.
Rosaviatsiya also noted that in addition to Prigozhin, Wagner’s high-ranking commander Dmitry Utkin was also in the jet with the mercenary group’s chief. The other people who died in the crash were Evgeniy Makaryan, Valeriy Chekalov, Sergey Propustin, Alexander Totmin, Rustam Karimov, Nikolay Matuseev, Aleksei Levshin, and Kristina Raspopova.
The news of Prigozhin’s apparent death came a couple of weeks after the Wagner chief executed an armed rebellion against the Kremlin because of the way it was handling the invasion of Ukraine. While he was about to enter Moscow with his troops, Prigozhin decided to cancel the mutiny as he said he didn’t Russian blood “to be spilled.” However, it was later revealed he reached a deal with the Kremlin, with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as intermediary.
Copyright 2023, AmericanProsperity.com
