A spokesman for the Kremlin denied any involvement in the plane crash that is believed to have killed Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

On Friday, Dmitry Peskov called the accusations that somehow the Russian government facilitated the crash "an absolute lie" in the first denial since the Wednesday crash.

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"Now, naturally, there are many speculations over this plane crash and the tragic death of the passengers, including Yevgeny Prigozhin. Of course, the West is selling these speculations from a certain angle. All of them are absolute lies. Here, of course, in covering this issue it is necessary to be based solely on facts," he said, according to Russian state media Tass.

Prigozhin, according to Russian officials, was on the passenger list along with nine others of a business jet that was going from Moscow to St. Petersburg on Wednesday evening when it crashed in the Tver region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged that the “tragedy” would be investigated.

"Regarding the airplane crash, first of all I would like to express my sincere condolences to the families of all those who died,” Putin said. "I knew Prigozhin for a very long time, since the early '90s. He was a man of complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in his life, but he achieved the right results ... It will be conducted in full and brought to a conclusion. There is no doubt about that.”

The Department of Defense's early assessment is that Prigozhin was killed in the crash, though it said initial reporting that a surface-to-air missile took the plane down was "inaccurate."

"Our initial assessment is that it's likely Prigozhin was killed. We're continuing to assess the situation," Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon's press secretary, said Thursday. "The press reporting stating that there was some type of surface-to-air missile that took down the plane, we assess that information to be inaccurate. Again, nothing to indicate, no information to suggest that there was a surface-to-air missile."

While it's unclear whether the two events are tied, Prigozhin led his forces in a brief but tumultuous revolt toward Moscow in June, with the stated goal of ousting Russian defense leaders. That uprising lasted about a day until Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have brokered an agreement between them.

A number of Putin critics have ended up dead or imprisoned.

Prigozhin's private military led the Russian troops in the battle of Bakhmut in Ukraine, though Wagner has mostly been pulled from the front lines of the war. It still has a heavy presence on the African continent carrying out Russian plans. There's a lot of speculation as to what will happen with the private military group now that it lost its leader and some of his top lieutenants.

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"After Wagner group's actions two months ago, in Russia, as you know, those forces were essentially removed from combat near Bakhmut where they had been fighting," Ryder explained. "As it relates to Africa, we'll see. Clearly, we know that the Wagner Group has for a while been conducting operations, has many tentacles, some military in nature, some criminal in nature in Africa in places like Burkina Faso and Mali."

Peskov added, "As for its future, I cannot tell you anything right now. I don’t know."