Russian investigators announced on Sunday that DNA evidence proved that the plane crash last week that killed 10 people included Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The names of all ten people on board the private jet that went down in the Tver region northwest of Moscow on Wednesday were previously published by Russia’s aviation agency. Prigozhin and his trusted aide, Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, were among them.
It had been speculated on pro-Wagner Telegram channels whether or not Prigozhin, who was known to take extra precautions in the event of an assassination attempt, was on the doomed flight.
The West hypothesizes that Putin killed Prigozhin in retaliation for the mutiny, which posed the greatest threat to his rule.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, stated on Friday that such claims are untrue. When asked if Putin would attend Prigozhin’s funeral, Peskov responded that it was too early to tell and cited the president’s “busy schedule.”
As part of the agreement that put an end to their mutiny, the Wagner forces have left Ukraine, with some of them settling in neighboring Belarus.
On May 2, two months before the crash, Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries staged a mutiny against Russian military commanders, seizing control of Rostov in the south and marching to within 200 kilometers (125 miles) of Moscow.
