US President Joe Biden reacted to Wagner Group’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death Wednesday by implying that Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind the killing as he is responsible for everything that happens in the country.
Prigozhin was killed after a private plane was shot down by the Russian defence forces killing him along with other nine people on board, officials confirmed.
A telegram channel linked with Prigozhin’s private military company said that the Embraer aircraft was shot down by air defences in the Tver region, north of Moscow — flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
The plane was carrying seven passengers and three crew.
Biden was speaking to reporters after taking an exercise class with his family near Lake Tahoe.
While reacting to the death of the 62-year-old billionaire, the Democrat presidential candidate said: “There’s not much that happens in Russia that [President Vladimir] Putin is not behind.”
“I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised,” Joe Biden said.
“But I don’t know enough to know the answer of what may have happened to the powerful former Putin henchman,” the 80-year-old said.
Prigozhin’s name was on the passenger list of the aircraft, which crashed northwest of Moscow, according to Russian media.
The crash came two months after he launched Wagner on a short-lived rebellious march on Moscow, aiming to force the removal of the country’s military leadership.
Last month in Helsinki, Biden jokingly warned that Prigozhin, whose elite Wagner force has played an important role in the war on Ukraine, should watch his step after his abortive rebellion.
“If I were he, I’d be careful what I ate. I’d keep my eye on my menu,” Biden said.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson also said Wednesday that no one should be surprised about Prigozhin’s sudden death if confirmed.
She referred to the June uprising and Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
“The disastrous war in Ukraine led to a private army marching on Moscow, and now — it would seem — to this,” said Watson.
Who was Russia’s Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Prigozhin, 62, soared in prominence after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where his fighters — including thousands of convicts he recruited from prison — led the Russian assault on the city of Bakhmut in the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.
Prigozhin used social media to trumpet Wagner’s successes and wage a feud with the military establishment, accusing it of incompetence and even treason.
In June, Prigozhin led a mutiny in which Wagner fighters took control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shot down a number of military helicopters, killing their pilots, as they advanced towards Moscow. President Vladimir Putin called it an act of treachery that would meet with a harsh response.
The revolt was defused in a deal whereby the Kremlin said that in order to avert bloodshed, Prigozhin and some of his fighters would leave for Belarus and a criminal case against him for armed mutiny would be dropped, reported Reuters.
Confusion has surrounded the implementation of the deal and the future of Prigozhin. The Kremlin said he attended a meeting with Putin five days after the mutiny. On July 5, state TV said an investigation against him was still being pursued and broadcast footage showing cash, passports, weapons and other items it said were seized on a raid on one of his properties.
But in late July, Prigozhin was photographed in St Petersburg while a Russia-Africa summit was taking place in the city. This week he appeared in a video that he suggested was shot in Africa, where Wagner has operations in several countries.
Born in St Petersburg on June 1, 1961, Prigozhin spent nine years in Soviet prisons for crimes including robbery and fraud. Released in 1990 amid the Soviet Union’s death throes, he launched a career as a caterer and restaurateur in his hometown.
He is believed to have met Putin, then a top aide to St Petersburg’s mayor, at this time. – Leveraging political connections, Prigozhin was awarded major state contracts, becoming known as “Putin’s chef” after catering for Kremlin events. More recently he joked that “Putin’s butcher” would be more appropriate.
In 2014, Prigozhin founded Wagner, a private military company whose fighters have deployed in support of Moscow’s allies in countries including Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic. The United States has sanctioned it and accused it of atrocities, which Prigozhin has denied.
Prigozhin has acknowledged that he founded and financed the Internet Research Agency, a company Washington says is a “troll farm” that meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. In November 2022 he said he had interfered in US elections and would do so again.
The Conspiracy
As reported by Newsweek, the Wagner-affiliated Gray Zone Telegram channel said Prigozhin and Utkin had died “as a result of the actions of traitors to Russia,” without specifying further. The channel also claimed the plane had been shot down by air defenses during its journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Vladimir Rogov, an official with the Russian-backed authorities in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, said he had received confirmation that Prigozhin and Utkin were dead, calling it a “murder.”
No evidence has been provided to support any of the claims and theories.
Russian Telegram channel Baza, linked to Russia’s security services, said on Wednesday that “Prigozhin has already ‘died’ before,” adding the Wagner financier was thought to have died in a plane crash in the fall of 2019.
Russian media reported in October 2019 that Prigozhin may have been killed when an An-72 military transport plane crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It later emerged he was not on the aircraft.
Reports that Prigozhin was killed are “likely false claims,” former racing driver Igor Sushko said in a post to X(formerly Twitter), “This stinks of Putin’s own plot to disappear,” he said.
However, Sushko then said exiled Russian human rights activist, Vladimir Osechkin, was “99.999% certain that Prigozhin was indeed assassinated by Putin,” claiming to cite Russian security sources.
“If I was Prigozhin, this is exactly how I’d plot my fake death,” another social media user wrote. “Everyone would be happy; I could retire in peace.”
Eastern-European outlet Visegrad 24 asked in a post to X: “Is it possible that the crash is a clever ploy by Prigozhin to fake his own death and disappear?”
Citing flight-tracking data, some speculate that a second plane owned by Prigozhin also left Moscow for St. Petersburg at around the same time, with some suggesting the Wagner chief was on this second plane.
Christo Grozev, of investigative outlet Bellingcat, added, said “everyone is holding their breath” to see whether Prigozhin would emerge alive from the second jet.
A Prigozhin Doppelganger?
There has also been speculation in recent months about whether Prigozhin has been using a body double, as the Wagner leader previously lost part of a finger, yet appeared to have all of his digits intact in photographs from earlier this year.
Following the Wagner mutiny in late June, photographs also emerged appearing to show Prigozhin donning a range of disguises, including a series of wigs.
“He is a trickster, a troll,” one source told Russian independent news outlet Meduza. “He has informants in various structures, so we have to wait.”
