Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed on Wednesday evening north of Moscow with no survivors, the Russian authorities said, raising fears among his allies that he had been killed.
There was no immediate official confirmation that Prigozhin, Russia’s most powerful mercenary and a self-declared enemy of the Russian Defence Ministry, was physically on board.
The channel, Grey Zone, declared Prigozhin a hero and a patriot who it said had died at the hands of unidentified people it called “traitors to Russia.”
If confirmed, his death would leave the Wagner Group, which incurred President Vladimir Putin’s wrath in June by staging an abortive armed mutiny against the army’s top brass, leaderless and raise questions about its future operations in Africa and elsewhere.
