(Washington Examiner) Russian paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is believed to have been killed after a plane in which he was “listed among the passengers” crashed in Russia on Wednesday, according to state media.
“An investigation into the Embraer plane crash that occurred in the Tver region this evening has been launched. Russia’s Federal Agency for Air Transport confirmed,” per state-run Tass. “According to the passenger list, the first and last name of Yevgeny Prigozhin was included in this list.”
A senior European official surmised to the Washington Examiner that it was an “assassination.”
The incident comes just two months after the longtime Wagner Group chief led his forces in a brief but tumultuous march toward Moscow in June, with the stated goal of ousting Russian defense leaders. That abortive uprising was halted within a day, as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have brokered an agreement to avert a major confrontation, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much-publicized promise of safe passage drew skepticism in Kyiv and trans-Atlantic circles.
“It is obvious that Putin does not forgive anyone for his own bestial terror … and he was waiting for the moment,” Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is also obvious that Prigozhin signed a special death warrant for himself the moment he believed in Lukashenko’s bizarre ‘guarantees’ and Putin’s equally absurd ‘word of honor.’ The demonstrative elimination of Prigozhin and the Wagner command two months after the coup attempt is a signal from Putin to Russia’s elites ahead of the 2024 elections.”
Podolyak offered that assessment despite acknowledging “it is worth waiting for the fog of war to disappear,” but other officials were even more hesitant to draw conclusions about such a high-profile incident in “the empire of lies,” as one senior lawmaker put it.
“If Muscovites start to kill each other and eat each other, why should we focus [on them]?” Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Zygimantas Pavilionis told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of it usually is fake, from both sides. It might be Prigozhin faking, it might be Russians faking. … They live on lying. They exist on lying.”
Yet other Western policymakers took the statements from Russian aviation authorities as an unmistakable signal.
