Conspiracy theories swirled Thursday surrounding the purported death of Russian mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin and some of his top lieutenants in a plane crash the day before.
Prigozhin, whose private military group Wagner had staged a short-lived armed rebellion against the Kremlin earlier this summer, was reported to be among the ten people aboard a short plane that crashed north of Moscow, according to Russia’s civil aviation agency, President Vladimir Putin and the state news outlet Tass.
The passenger list on the small private plane included the warlord’s second-in-command Dmitry Utkin, Wagner’s logistics chief, a fighter whom US airstrikes in Syria had wounded and at least one possible bodyguard.
A channel on Russia’s social media network Telegram affiliated with the paramilitary unit confirmed Wednesday that Prigozhin was aboard the plane and had been killed in retribution for his mutiny, calling him a “true patriot of his Motherland.”
The 62-year-old’s fate had been the subject of intense speculation since Putin denounced his march towards Moscow amid grievances with how Wagner forces had been used in the Ukraine War as “treason” and vowed to avenge it, and unproven theories were abound in the wake of reports of his death.
Two US officials and some supporters of Prigozhin had speculated online that the plane was hit by a missile, pointing to eyewitness accounts and purported footage of a one-winged plane falling from the sky near the village of Kuzhenkino, published by state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
Preliminary investigations indicated that a surface-to-air missile that was launched from inside Russia took down the plane, according to two American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday.
A resident who witnessed the disaster told RIA Novosti outlet she heard “something like a bang, like a shot,” before seeing the plane fall from the sky.
“Then suddenly an explosion, I look up and heard a sound above me – it was like pops, like several explosions.
“The plane started to swerve. Then a plume of smoke emerged and the plane began to descend, to dive,” she said.
Kuzhenkino resident Anastasia Bukharova, 27, also witnessed the plane crash.
“Something sort of was torn from it in the air, and it began to go down and down,” she added.
Witness Vitaly Stepenok, 72, said, “I hear an explosion or a bang. Usually, if an explosion happens on the ground then you get an echo, but it was just a bang and I looked up and saw white smoke,” according to Sky News.
“One wing flew off in one direction and the fuselage went like that,” he said, gesturing with his arms to show how the plane headed down towards the ground.
“And then it glided down on one wing. It didn’t nose-dive, it was gliding.”
The accounts led to speculation that the plane had been shot down on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where it stopped transmitting tracking information after reaching an altitude of 28,000 feet.
“It’s coming down quickly in a spin, and it’s trailing a lot of smoke. So, this is an aircraft that was on fire. And it looks like some structural pieces, aerodynamic surfaces, were missing,” science and aerospace reporter Miles O’Brien told CNN.
“An aircraft like this … they just don’t catastrophically drop out of the sky without something very unusual happening,” he said.
Theories that the plane was shot down would mesh with Putin’s history of eliminating enemies at all costs, which was alluded to by the leader of the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party.
“Prigozhin messed with too many people in Russia, Ukraine and the West,” Sergey Mironov wrote online. It now seems that at some point his number of enemies reached a critical point.”
Others have theorized that it was an onboard explosion that brought down the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet, which showed no signs of distress until its “sudden downward vertical” fall, according to Ian Petchenik of the flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
An unsupported hypothesis making the rounds on Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which is linked to Russian security services, is that a bomb was planted on board, possibly inside a crate of wine.
“Supposedly someone testified that at the very last moment, a certain gift consisting of a crate of expensive wine was loaded unto the plane,” wrote VChK-OGPU. “And now they are looking into claims that the crate may have contained a bomb.”
The plane had been carefully searched with sniffer dogs before the wine crate had been loaded, added the Telegram channel.
The possibility that an explosive was planted in the jet’s landing gear was also under investigation, according to the Russian outlet SHOT, which reported that a flight attendant who was killed in the crash told family members that the plane was being held up for repairs before takeoff.
“Certainly it’s an inside job, the suggestion is that it’s a bomb in a wine crate,” former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele told Sky News.
“That’s a kind of ironic end for Putin’s former caterer,” he added, referring to Prigozhin’s restaurants and catering companies that provide services to the Kremlin.
Conspiracy theorists are also pushing the possibility that he was not on the downed plane, suggesting that he may have actually been on a second jet linked to the Wagner group that landed safely in St. Petersburg.
Without the results of forensic evidence, it can’t be known for certain if Prigozhin was actually on the doomed plane, according to the conspiracy theorists.
The last four digits of the registration number of the plane that went down were 2795, lining it up with Prigozhin’s own plane which is registered as RA-02795.
However, a second jet – an Embraer ERJ-135BJ Legacy 650 aircraft – touched down at Ostafyevo Airport at around the same time of the crash, The Sun reported.
The speculation was fueled by an incident in the Democratic Republic of the Congo four years ago where Prigozhin was reported to have died in a plane crash, only to have appeared days later.
“Multiple individuals have changed their name to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as part of his efforts to obfuscate his travels,” Keir Giles, a Russia expert with the international affairs think tank Chatham House, told the outlet.
“Let’s not be surprised if he pops up shortly in a new video from Africa.”
In a separate interview with Sky News, Giles said, “This is a man who took his security very seriously, even before he made himself a marked man by marching on Moscow.”
When Prigozhin surfaced in a military recruitment video purportedly filmed in Africa earlier this week, some were surprised that he was still alive, two months after occupying Rostov-on-Don and leading 25,000 of his men toward Moscow.
A surrender was brokered by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko that allowed Prigozhin to seek safe harbor in the nation, which is an ally of Russia.
Unverified footage of the leader wearing camo and toting an assault weapon appeared on Telegram Tuesday, more than a month after a former senior US military leader suggested he had already been murdered.
“I personally don’t think he is, and if he is, he’s in a prison somewhere,” Robert Abrams, a retired general, told ABC News when asked if he thought Prigozhin was alive.
The apparent attack came on the eve of Ukraine’s Independence Day, fueling speculation that the country had been behind the downing of the plane of the warlord who had supplemented Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
Rumors of Ukraine’s possible involvement prompted President Volodymyr Zelensky to set the record straight Thursday.
“We had nothing to do with it,” Zelensky said, as his country had ramped up counteroffensives on Russian soil.
“Everybody realizes who has something to do with it,” he continued, alluding to Putin, who had sent condolences to Prigozhin’s family Thursday in his first public acknowledgment of the plane crash.
With Post wires