The White House is "increasingly confident" that Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in an airplane crash last week, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Prigozhin, according to Russian officials, was on the passenger list, 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 authorities announced on Sunday that DNA testing confirmed Prigozhin was aboard the downed aircraft.

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"We are increasingly confident that Prigozhin died in the plane crash," Jean-Pierre said during Monday's briefing. Last Thursday, the Department of Defense's spokesman stated its early assessment is that Prigozhin was killed, though he 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," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon's press secretary. "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."

The Kremlin denied any responsibility for sabotaging the plane, and while Russian President Vladimir Putin shared his "sincere condolences to the families of all those who died," he has not accused Ukraine or any other actor of being responsible for what happened.

While it's unclear whether the two events are related, Prigozhin led his forces in a brief revolt toward Moscow in June, with the goal of ousting Russian defense leaders, whom he had long accused of wrongdoing. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have brokered an agreement to avert a major confrontation a day after it began.

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Prigozhin accused top members of the Defense Ministry of "deceiving" Russian society about the war, in addition to claiming they withheld military resources on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, leading to unnecessary casualties.

Several Putin critics have ended up dead or imprisoned, leading to speculation that Putin was somehow responsible for Prigozhin's death.