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Rosaviatsia, the Russian aviation authority, said Prigozhin and senior Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin were among 10 people travelling on the Embraer business jet that crashed on Wednesday evening.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give the Russian state ample motive for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.
Prigozhin’s allies quickly accused the Russian defence ministry of assassinating the Wagner chief. Grey Zone, a popular Telegram channel with more than 500,000 subscribers linked to Wagner, claimed that Prigozhin’s plane had been “shot down by an anti-aircraft system under the control of the ministry of defence of the Russian Federation”. The channel did not cite evidence for the claim.