WASHINGTON (AP) — A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment has found that the plane crash presumed to have killed Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was intentionally caused by an explosion, according to U.S. and Western officials.
One of the officials, who were not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the explosion falls in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics.”
The officials did not offer any details on what caused the explosion that was believed to have killed Prigozhin and several of his lieutenants to avenge a mutiny that challenged the Russian leader’s authority.
Details of the U.S. assessment surfaced as Putin on Thursday expressed his condolences to the families of those who were reported to be aboard the jet and referred to “serious mistakes” by Prigozhin. The White House declined to comment.
The founder of the Wagner military company and six other passengers were on a private jet that crashed Wednesday soon after taking off from Moscow with a crew of three, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority. Rescuers found 10 bodies, and Russian media cited anonymous sources in Wagner who said Prigozhin was dead. But there has been no official confirmation.
President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said that he believed Putin was behind the crash, though he acknowledged that he did not, at that time, have solid information verifying his belief.
“I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised,” Biden said. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind. But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”
If the deaths are confirmed, the crash would be the most serious blow the group has ever suffered to its leadership.
The passenger manifest included Prigozhin and his second-in-command who baptized the group with his nom de guerre, as well as Wagner’s logistics chief, a fighter wounded by U.S. airstrikes in Syria and at least one possible bodyguard.
It was not clear why several high-ranking members of Wagner, including top leaders who are normally exceedingly careful about their security, were on the same flight. The purpose of their joint trip to St. Petersburg was unknown.
In all, the other passengers included six of Prigozhin’s lieutenants, along with the three-member flight crew.
At Wagner’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross, and Prigozhin supporters built a makeshift memorial, piling red and white flowers outside the building Thursday, along with company flags and candles.
In this first comments on the crash, Putin said the passengers had “made a significant contribution” to the fighting in Ukraine.
“We remember this, we know, and we will not forget,” the president said in a televised interview with the Russian-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin.
Putin recalled that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s and described him as “a man of difficult fate” who had “made serious mistakes in life, and he achieved the results he needed — both for himself and, when I asked him about it, for the common cause, as in these last months. He was a talented man, a talented businessman.”
