The Kremlin has denied that it assassinated the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, calling western intelligence assessments of Vladimir Putin’s potential involvement “an absolute lie”.
Prigozhin is believed to have been killed when his Embraer jet crashed north-west of Moscow on Wednesday, according to Russian officials. Western intelligence officials have briefed media that Prigozhin was most likely to have been killed by an explosion onboard the plane on President Putin’s orders.
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday: “There is a lot of speculation around this disaster, around the tragic death of the passengers on the plane, including Yevgeny Prigozhin. Of course, in the west all these speculations are presented from a certain angle. This is all an absolute lie.”
Putin on Friday moved quickly to take advantage of Prigozhin’s death by issuing a decree requiring Wagner and all other private military company fighters to swear an oath of allegiance to Russia.
Prigozhin had refused to submit his mercenaries to direct state control, despite a direct request from Putin during a meeting at the Kremlin in June. His armed uprising that month came days before a deadline that would have forced the group to sign military contracts.
Putin’s decree, which was published on government websites, was meant to build the “spiritual and moral foundations for the defence” of Russia and ensure that the mercenaries “strictly follow the orders of their commanders and superiors”, the statement said.
Officials have been slow to confirm Prigozhin’s death, although he was listed on a flight manifest published by the Russian aviation agency on Wednesday. Peskov said Putin was waiting for the results of a full investigation into the crash, and indicated efforts to identify Prigozhin’s remains using DNA testing were continuing.
On Friday night Russian investigators said they had recovered flight recorders and 10 bodies from the scene of the plane crash.
Prigozhin was known to have body doubles, multiple passports, and to regularly wear disguises when travelling. He has been falsely reported as being killed twice before, including in a plane crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019.
This time, the Russian government had an obvious motive to assassinate Prigozhin, who had clashed with its defence ministry, captured military installations and launched a “march of justice” on Moscow.
The UK Ministry of Defence said in a daily intelligence update on Friday: “There is not yet definitive proof that Prigozhin was onboard and he is known to exercise exceptional security measures. However, it is highly likely that he is indeed dead.”
Putin appeared to eulogise Prigozhin on Thursday evening, saying he had known the Wagner head since the early 1990s. He said Prigozhin had “made some serious mistakes in life” but praised him for his role in the war in Ukraine.
“We remember this, know this, and won’t forget it,” Putin said, referring to Prigozhin in the past tense.
Alexei Dyumin, a former Putin bodyguard who is now the governor of Tula, also offered condolences. “I knew Yevgeny Prigozhin as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless person,” he said on Friday. “He did much for the country, and the motherland will not forget him. We mourn for all those killed in this catastrophe and to all the fighters of Wagner, who have died in the [war].”
He denied Prigozhin had betrayed Russia, part of a posthumous rehabilitation of the Wagner head’s reputation that closely followed Putin’s remarks the previous day. “Mistakes and even cowardice can be forgiven, but treason – never,” Dyumin said. “They were not traitors.”
Wagner fighters and a few dozen members of the public gathered at a makeshift memorial for Prigozhin in his home town of St Petersburg on Thursday. One man in camouflage was filmed crying in front of portraits of Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, a senior battlefield commander also believed to have died in the crash.
It was Putin who had first accused Wagner of treason during the short-lived mutiny in which troops captured a defence headquarters in Rostov and marched on Moscow.
In his remarks to journalists on Friday, Peskov said he did not want to speculate on Wagner’s future, but denied the group had any formal standing as a mercenary outfit. “Let’s not forget that there is no such structure, there is no Wagner private military company,” he said. “There is, indeed, a Wagner group.”
At the same time, he repeated remarks by Putin that Wagner had “made a great contribution to the liberation of many districts of the Donetsk People’s Republic”, a term used by Russia to describe a region of occupied Ukraine. “And the heroism of these people will never be forgotten – the president spoke about this,” he said.
There were signs that some Russian officials were distancing themselves from Wagner. In the town of Mykolaivka, in occupied Crimea, a viral video showed local officials had torn down dozens of wooden headstones marking graves in a Wagner cemetery and thrown them in a pile.
“This is blasphemy,” said the Wagner supporter who filmed the video. “These people died for Russia and you levelled their graves. Do you not fear God?”
The Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, said Wagner fighters would remain in his country, although he confirmed that parts of a field camp erected for the mercenaries had been removed. “They are not running anywhere,” he said. “As long as we need this unit, they will live and work with us.”
He denied having given Prigozhin security guarantees after the mutiny, and claimed he passed information about a planned assassination attempt against Prigozhin on to the Kremlin.
“Many people are now trying to put the responsibility for the incident with Prigozhin’s plane on Putin, but he has nothing to do with it,” Lukashenko said.
US and western officials said it was likely that an intentional explosion brought down the plane, which crashed into a field 185 miles (300km) north of Moscow.
“A definitive conclusion has not been reached, but an explosion is the leading theory of what caused the plane to crash in a field between Moscow and St Petersburg,” the New York Times quoted the officials as saying. “The explosion could have been caused by a bomb or other device planted on the aircraft.”
Online flight data and video of the crash showed that “most likely at least one catastrophic midair event … occurred several minutes before the private jet crashed,” the paper reported. That would indicate some kind of explosion onboard or other serious event, rather than a mechanical failure.
The UK defence intelligence update predicted a leadership vacuum in Wagner without Prigozhin. “The demise of Prigozhin would almost certainly have a deeply destabilising effect on the Wagner group,” the Ministry of Defence said. “His personal attributes of hyperactivity, exceptional audacity, a drive for results and extreme brutality permeated Wagner and are unlikely to be matched by any successor.”
Wagner’s operations in Africa are expected to be captured by the Russian defence ministry.
Finnish media reported on Friday that one of the leaders of a Russian neo-Nazi group who fought in Ukraine had been detained on terrorism charges. Yan Petrovsky, 36, was under EU and US sanctions for fighting against the Ukrainian government in the Donetsk regions in 2014-15. His group, Rusich, is one of the most prominent Russian mercenary groups after Wagner.
