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The plane crash of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group, has some paradoxical elements: the Russian civil aviation said that Prigozhin was probably on board (he was on the passenger list, and the information was confirmed also by the airline that operated the private jet) and that all people on board are surely dead; Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his condolences to the families of the passengers on the plane, also speaking of Prigozhin, without formally confirming his death. Yet few newspapers and no government in the world are still giving Prigozhin for dead, and almost all continue to treat the news of his death as presumed and not yet verified. There are basically two reasons.
The first and most important reason concerns the fact that the Russian authorities who took possession of the bodies of the people on board the plane have not yet given any information on the autopsies and on the operations for recognizing the bodies. At the moment, therefore, Prigozhin’s body has not yet been identified.
Then there is a second reason that concerns the way Prigozhin has always handled information concerning him. For years, the head of the Wagner group has spread disinformation, handled lies and false news and organized misdirections about his activity, his movements and even his identity. For this reason, in the hours following the plane crash, theories and hypotheses began to spread about the possibility that Prigozhin is not really dead, that he wasn’t really on board the jet and that, once again, the plane crash was some kind of misdirection organized by Prigozhin himself or by the Russian state.
At the moment all these hypotheses are in fact conspiracy theories. Most likely, Prigozhin was actually inside the plane and died in the crash. But even many reputable experts, knowing the background of the head of the Wagner group, have said that they do not trust Prigozhin for dead until incontrovertible evidence is made public: for example Keir Giles, a researcher at the British research center Chatham House, he said that «until we know for sure That [quello morto] he is the real Prigozhin, let’s not be surprised if he will soon reappear in a new video from Africa».
For years Prigozhin lied about his activities. For example, despite having founded the Wagner group in 2014, until last year he has always and openly denied any connection with the mercenaries, to the point of suing the journalists who spoke about it in their articles. Only last year, after the war had begun, did Prigozhin publicly assume his role as Wagner’s boss, starting to recruit soldiers for his militia.
But above all, there are numerous indications that Prigozhin has been preparing misdirection and escape operations for years. After the Wagner group’s armed uprising in June, Russian law enforcement raided the group’s St. Petersburg headquarters and found numerous fake passports in Prigozhin’s office, some of which were supposedly distributed to look-alikes. that they could have traveled in his place.
Evil irony…
In one of Prigozhin’s fake passports, the Tver region is listed as a place of birth. pic.twitter.com/K0Z8ChqwaV
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) August 23, 2023
Photographs of Prigozhin in numerous disguises had also been found, albeit not very convincing.
A plane crashed in Tver. 6 passages are reported dead: pic.twitter.com/WJbdLjrems
— Saint Javelin (@saintjavelin) August 23, 2023
By itself, the fact that Prigozhin had fake passports doesn’t explain much, but after the plane crash it has fueled suspicions. There is also a kind of precedent, although it took place in very different circumstances. In 2019, a military transport plane carrying two Russian nationals crashed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then the rumor began to spread that one of the two Russians on board was Prigozhin. But three days later Prigozhin reappeared online, denying reports of his death.