Wagner chief Prigozhin ‘killed’ as 10 die in plane crash near Moscow – follow live

Russian president Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to the Southern Military District headquarters which Wagner fighters had briefly taken control of during the coup, the British Ministry of Defence said today.

Situated in Rostov-on-Don, approximately 160km from the frontline, the headquarters hosted Putin last week on Saturday, the ministry said.

The HQ hosts military staff running the war in Ukraine.

“Putin held a meeting with senior officers, including Chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov who continues to command the operation in Ukraine,” the MoD said in its latest intelligence update.

The Russian president “highly likely wishes to project his authority and to portray the senior military command as functioning as usual”, it added.

Yevgeny Prigozhin‘s fate has been entwined with the Kremlin for decades — as a trusted government contractor, and the head of the Wagner mercenary army that fought in Ukraine and has been blamed for doing Russia’s dirty work in Syria and Africa.

But when he turned his men toward Moscow two months ago, many inside Russia and beyond started wondering just how long he could last after drawing the fury of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It was reported that Prigozhin cut a deal with Putin and the leader of Belarus for a safe haven for himself and the men involved in the rebellion. He was reported to pop up periodically in Russia, and appeared in a recruitment video earlier this week.

But then on Wednesday Russia’s civil aviation agency said he was aboard a plane that crashed north of Moscow, killing all 10 people on board.

Read more about him here:

Several experts have speculated that all may not be as it seems with the crash of a private jet on Wednesday carrying a passenger named “Yevgeny Prigozhin”, even after Russia appeared to confirm the death of the Wagner mercenary group boss.

Russia’s air traffic authority confirmed Prigozhin was named in the passenger list for the flight and Vladimir Rogov, a Russia-appointed official in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region in Ukraine, said he talked to Wagner commanders who also confirmed that Prigozhin was aboard, as was Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin’s close aide whose call sign – Wagner – became the company’s name.

But Keir Giles, a Russia expert with the international affairs think tank Chatham House, urged caution about reports of Prigozhin’s death. He said “multiple individuals have changed their name to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as part of his efforts to obfuscate his travels”.

Flight tracking data showed a private jet that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.

Another private jet believed to be right behind the downed one took a U-turn, according to unverified flight tracking data.

An early morning missile strike injured seven people in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, governor of Dnipropetrovsk region Serhiy Lisak said today.

Three men and four women were among the wounded, he said.

Vladimir Putin was at a concert hailing the “heroes” of Russia’s Ukraine invasion and marking a Second World War battle as a plane thought to be carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed, killing all those on board.

The Russian president was filmed making a speech at the concert commemorating the victory of Soviet troops in the 1943 Battle of Kursk on the 80th anniversary.

Video footage suggested he handed out military honours at the event in Kursk, not far from the Ukrainian border in southwest Russia.

Russian air defence systems shot down three Ukrainian drones over Russian regions in the early hours today, its defence ministry claimed.

Of these, two drones were downed over the Bryansk region that borders Ukraine and one over the Kaluga region that is closer to Moscow.

Moscow has been under attack from Ukrainian drones for one week straight with many of them appearing to target Moscow’s city centre, though they have mostly been downed by Russia’s air defence systems without any casualties.

Ukraine does not typically take responsibility for attacks targeting Russian soil or the occupied Crimean peninsula, though Ukrainian officials have often lauded these attacks.

A Telegram channel linked to the Wagner mercenary group has published Yevgeny Prigozhin’s comments on his “inevitable” death.

The channel had pronounced him dead and hailed him as a hero and a patriot who it said had died at the hands of unidentified people it called “traitors to Russia.”

“‘We will all go to hell, but we will be the best in hell,’ sums up Yevgeny Prigozhin,” the channel said today in a post citing excerpts from an old interview.

It also cited remarks on death by the Wagner chief’s close associate and co-founder of the group Dmitry Utkin. “Death is not the end, it’s just the beginning of something else,” the channel said in a post.

Prigozhin’s death would leave the Wagner Group, which incurred Putin’s wrath in June by staging an abortive mutiny against the army’s top brass, leaderless and raise questions about its future operations in Africa and elsewhere.

Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency deliberately lured a Russian military pilot to land his Mi-8 helicopter at a Ukrainian airfield, a spokesman said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Fighterbomber, a popular Russian pro-war Telegram channel focused on aviation, said it had information that the helicopter had got lost and accidentally landed in Ukraine “a couple of weeks ago”.

In April, Ukraine’s domestic security service accused a number of Ukrainian military personnel of treason after what it said was an unsuccessful attempt to lure a Russian pilot to land at a Ukrainian air base, which led to a lethal Russian missile strike on that location in July 2022.

Speaking on Wednesday, Ukrainian spokesman Andriy Yusov said: “This was a GUR operation. The aircraft moved according to the plan.”

Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda cited unnamed intelligence sources as saying the agency worked for over six months to convince the pilot to cooperate and fly the aircraft to Ukraine.

The report said the helicopter landed in eastern Ukraine with the pilot. Two other crew members who were unaware of the plan were subsequently “liquidated”.

The European Union’s military leadership has expressed doubts that Ukraine will regain any territory lost in the war with Russia, reported German newspaper Die Welt.

“It remains questionable whether Ukraine‘s full sovereignty can be restored with the resources available,” said Robert Brieger, chairman of the European Union Military Committee (EUMC), the highest military body in the EU which is composed of the 27 member states.

Regarding the Ukraine’s counter-offensive, which has been ongoing since June, Mr Brieger said he would be “cautious to expect a breakthrough of the Ukrainian forces through the Russian defence lines.”