Wagner fighters gather at makeshift memorial to Yevgeny Prigozhin
Wagner fighters and a few dozen members of the public have gathered at a makeshift memorial for Yevgeny Prigozhin in his home town of St Petersburg as the Kremlin kept its silence on the warlord’s apparent death in a plane crash.
Footage of the memorial set up outside Wagner’s headquarters in the city showed men in military camouflage on Thursday laying flowers on the ground in front of portraits of Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, a close Prigozhin ally often described as the founder of the mercenary group who was also named on the passenger list.
In one clip, a fighter in full military garb can be seen falling to his knees and weeping.
“I am here to honour the memory of Prigozhin … I support his politics, Wagner is just,” said one young man standing outside the memorial on Wednesday evening in an interview published by the Russian Sota outlet.
Meanwhile, crash investigators in Kuzhenkino, in Russia’s Tver region, picked through the wreckage of a jet that officials said was carrying Prigozhin and crashed with no survivors.
One resident, Vitaly Stepenok, 72, told Reuters he heard an “explosion or a bang” before seeing the jet plummet to the ground.
“Usually, if an explosion happens on the ground then you get an echo, but it was just a bang and I looked up and saw white smoke,” Stepenok said. “One wing flew off in one direction and the fuselage went like that,” he said, gesturing with his arms to show how the plane headed down towards the ground. “And then it glided down on one wing. It didn’t nose-dive, it was gliding.”
Another villager, who gave his name as Anatoly, said: “In terms of what might have happened, I’ll just say this: it wasn’t thunder, it was a metallic bang – let’s put it that way. I’ve heard things like that before.”
Russian authorities said on Thursday that the investigation into the crash would be led by Ivan Sibul, a veteran investigator who has previously examined other high-profile plane crashes, but the Kremlin and the defence ministry made no comment on the fate of Prigozhin.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said Kyiv had nothing to do with the presumed death of Prigozhin. The Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Zelenskiy telling journalists on Thursday: “We had nothing to do with it. Everybody realises who has something to do with it.”
The Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said the plane crash on Wednesday evening – exactly two months after Wagner forces marched on Moscow – was “a signal from Putin to Russia’s elites ahead of the 2024 elections. ‘Beware! Disloyalty equals death.’”
Those sentiments were echoed by the Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak, whose father Vladimir Putin once described as his mentor. “Absolutely clear signal to all the elites, in fact, to everyone who had any seditious thoughts,” she said on Telegram.
State television gave the crash limited coverage on Thursday, while prominent propagandists largely urged Russians to wait on the result of the investigation.
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Putin made no reference to the plane crash during a virtual address to a summit of Brics nations in South Africa, which his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was attending. Later in the day, Putin met members of a tank brigade that fought in Ukraine but again made no mention of the plane crash.
There has been no confirmation yet on whether Prigozhin’s body has been identified. Bodies that were found at the crash site were driven to the morgue of a forensic medical examination bureau in the city of Tver, according to the St Petersburg outlet Fontanka. A source in the morgue told Fontanka “there were signs” that Prigozhin was among the dead, but added that the body in question was badly damaged after the crash.
Baza, a news outlet with close ties to security services, said the biological material of the victims was sent to Moscow for genetic analysis.
Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in part of southern Zaporizhzhia, said on the Telegram app that a member of the Wagner group identified Prigozhin’s body by a missing part of his finger on his left hand.
Several social media channels close to Prigozhin have issued tributes, with one major channel appearing to pin the blame on the Russian authorities despite some circumspection elsewhere in the aftermath of the crash to declare that the Kremlin-connected businessman was definitively present on the plane.
“Prigozhin died as the result of the actions of Russia’s traitors,” wrote the Grey Zone, a social media outlet close to Wagner. “But even in hell, he’ll be the best! Glory to Russia!”
Marat Gabidullin, a former Wagner commander and assistant to Prigozhin, told the Guardian he “had no reason to believe that Prigozhin was still alive”. “I don’t have any indication that it wasn’t him on the plane. My contacts at Wagner also say he died.”