The Kremlin on Friday denied having ordered the death of Yevgeny Prigojine, leader of the paramilitary group Wagner and enemy of Vladimir Putin, presumed dead after the crash of his plane. “It’s an absolute lie, we must approach this problem (of the crash) based on facts,” said Dmitri Peskov, the spokesperson for the Russian president when asked about the insinuations of Western leaders according to which the Kremlin would have ordered the assassination of Yevgeny Prigojine.
“Currently, around the air disaster and the tragic deaths of passengers, in particular Evguéni Prigojine, there is a lot of speculation and we know well in what direction we speculate in the West”, he also said. According to him, the investigation is ongoing, noting that Vladimir Putin had himself indicated Thursday to “wait for the results”.
The bodies of the victims still being identified
The Russian president, who considered Yevgeny Prigojine a traitor since the armed rebellion of Wagner on June 23 and 24, hailed Thursday evening, after 24 hours of silence, the memory of a “talented” man who nevertheless committed “serious mistakes in his life”.
For the moment, the death of the head of Wagner remains presumed because genetic expertise to formally identify the bodies of the victims is still in progress. The investigators said nothing about the tracks examined, evoking neither the thesis of the accident, nor that of a bomb, a surface-to-air missile or a pilot error.
The private jet carrying Prigojine and his close guard crashed late Wednesday afternoon northwest of Moscow, immediately raising suspicions of an orchestrated assassination at the pinnacle of Russian power. In Washington, Paris, Berlin or kyiv, senior officials have implied that their suspicions go directly to the Kremlin.
On Thursday, French government spokesman Olivier Véran said there were “reasonable doubts” about “the conditions” of the air crash.