Wagner Group’s Prigozhin on passenger list of flight that crashed north of Moscow, Russian officials say

A business jet en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed Wednesday, killing all ten people on board, Russian emergency officials said.

Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list, officials said, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was on board.

Unconfirmed media reports said the jet belonged to Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company. Russia’s civilian aviation regulator, Rosaviatsia, said Prigozhin was on the passenger list.

Russia’s state news agency Tass cited emergency officials as saying that the plane carried three pilots and seven passengers.

The plane was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg and went down in the Tver region, more than 100 kilometres north of Moscow. Authorities are investigating.

Signal disappeared after takeoff

Flight tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press shows a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.

The signal was lost in a rural region where there are no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told reporters Wednesday that officials in Ottawa are “assessing the situation” and that she would be talking to Canada’s ambassador to Russia.

Prigozhin, whose private military force Wagner fought alongside Russia’s regular army in Ukraine, mounted a short-lived armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in late June. The Kremlin said he would be exiled to Belarus, and his fighters would either retire, follow him there, or join the Russian military.

Shortly after that, Wagner fighters set up camp in Belarus, but Prigozhin’s plane, according to media reports, was flying back and forth between Belarus and Russia.

This week, Prigozhin posted his first recruitment video since the mutiny, saying that Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free.”