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Russian authorities have confirmed the death of Wagner paramilitary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, amid speculation about potential successors and the future of the group as a whole.
Genetic testing proved that Prigozhin had been onboard the private jet that crashed outside Moscow on its way to St Petersburg, according to results released on Sunday. Western officials assumed that the warlord was killed on the orders of President Vladimir Putin in retribution for a mutiny he led in June, which posed the biggest challenge to the Russian president in decades. The Kremlin has denied any involvement.
Russia’s aviation agency had listed Prigozhin’s name among the passengers on the aircraft shortly after the crash on Wednesday but officials said to wait for DNA testing before confirming his death.
“According to [DNA] results, the identities of all 10 victims have been established, and they correspond to the list stated in the flight manifest,” a spokeswoman for the investigation committee said on Sunday.
Prigozhin’s right-hand man, Wagner founder and military mastermind, Dmitry Utkin, was also confirmed dead — adding to questions about the future of the group after the demise of its leaders.
On Sunday, Wagner-affiliated channels on Telegram continued to share images of small memorials set up for the two men around Russia. The irregular force is accused of war crimes in Ukraine and in African countries, but became popular in Russia after it won a battle for the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine, the only victory for Moscow so far this year.
Made up of thousands of armed and battle-hardened men, many of them convicts Prigozhin recruited directly from Russian prisons, Wagner has partly relocated to Belarus since the aborted mutiny in June. Others remain in Russia and some also make up Wagner’s sprawling international operation, operating in the Middle East and across Africa.
The Kremlin has not commented so far on what lies in store for Wagner.
The Russian army had long sought to bring the group to heel, after months of Prigozhin launching into blistering personal critiques of the army’s leadership. Their efforts to disband the group this spring and absorb its fighters were the ultimate trigger for Prigozhin’s uprising and march on Moscow.
On Saturday, the Kremlin made a fresh move to rein in Wagner and other militias. Putin signed a decree ordering all members of such units, which also include volunteer battalions and territorial defence groups, to swear allegiance to Russia, a formal oath made by regular soldiers.
Wagner-affiliated channels on Telegram have sought in recent days to counter claims that their fighters were leaderless and were being absorbed into the regular armed forces.
One, an anonymous channel called Wagner Orchestra with almost 1mn subscribers, said that Anton Elizarov, call sign “Lotus”, was the most senior Wagner leader after the crash and was “already in charge of the company’s combat and training work”.
Another leading figure being floated as a potential successor is Andrei Troshev, whose call sign “Sedoy” means “the grey-haired one”. Troshev, a veteran of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was sanctioned by the EU in 2021 for being a “founding member and executive director” of Wagner and for being directly involved in its Syria operations.
According to Wagner-linked channels, Troshev left Wagner after the mutiny and joined another private military company called Redut that is under the control of the defence ministry. He was part of a delegation of Wagner leaders, including Prigozhin and Utkin, who met Putin in July.
The deal brokered to end the mutiny was believed to have included a guarantee of safety for Prigozhin and his men, and the warlord used the same plane that went down to fly between Moscow and St Petersburg multiple times after the insurrection.
But Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko who mediated the agreement claimed on Friday that he had warned the warlord that he could not protect him.
Prigozhin’s plane came down exactly two months after Wagner’s uprising, with parallels being drawn between this crash and the fact that his troops who marched on Moscow had shot down a plane carrying regular Russian soldiers, killing over a dozen men.
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