Dozens of Russians came to the headquarters of the Wagner group in St Petersburg and the mercenary facilities in Novosibirsk to lay flowers in memory of Yevgueni Prigozhin, who was believed to have died in a plane crash on Wednesday.
Group supporters also lit candles and placed them in a kind of makeshift memorial to Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries.
Footage posted to social media shows a man in a Wagner uniform in tears after laying flowers in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where the group opened an office last March.
The private jet on which the head of the Wagner group was traveling crashed on Wednesday in the Tver region, north of Moscow, en route from the Russian capital to St Petersburg.
The crash, the causes of which are still unknown, killed the plane’s ten occupants.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) said Prigozhin was one of the passengers of a private jet that crashed north of Moscow, killing all on board.
According to the same source, the passengers also included Dmitry Utkin, one of the founders of the Wagner group and a former officer of the Russian special forces.
Several European countries and the United States are suspicious of the Kremlin’s responsibility for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s presumed death.
On Wednesday, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, had already said that “few things happen in Russia without Putin having something to do with it.”
In Ukraine, the intelligence services of the Ministry of Defense were convinced that the Kremlin was behind the crash of the plane carrying Prigozhin.
The director of intelligence services of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, Andri Yusov, stated that while the information that Prigozhin traveled on that plane is yet to be confirmed, the most likely scenario is that he was one of the passengers.
Source: DN
