The funeral of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, who died in a plane crash north of Moscow last week, took place on Tuesday in a small closed-door ceremony on the outskirts of his hometown, St. Petersburg.
According to a statement released on social networks by the Concord group, which brings together the Prigozhin business universe, the funeral took place behind closed doors and discreetly at the Porokhovskoye cemetery.
The location of the funeral was kept secret until Tuesday as security measures were activated at several cemeteries in St. Petersburg.
The Kremlin confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral.
Those wishing to say goodbye to the 62-year-old mercenary leader should head to the Porokhovskoye cemetery, according to the statement from the Concord group.
The Russian Investigative Committee (CIR) confirmed this Sunday that the body of Prigozhin and that of the other nine passengers from the plane crash on Wednesday in the Tver region, north of Moscow, had been identified through comparative DNA analysis.
Prigozhin’s Embraer Legacy 600, which crashed for as yet unknown reasons some 200 kilometers northwest of Moscow while flying from the Russian capital to St. Petersburg, was also the lead commander and co-founder of the mercenary company, Dmitri Utkin.
The investigations have not clarified the causes of the disaster, which include an explosion on board, a technical failure or even a piloting error.
Some media pointed out the possibility that the aircraft had been shot down, intentionally or by mistake, by missiles from the anti-aircraft defense units that protect a residence of the Russian president, located next to the route that the plane was following.
After taking the city of Bahkmut, after months of the bloodiest battle in Ukraine, amid open criticism by its leader of the Russian Minister of Defense and the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the Wagner group launched an armed rebellion two months ago against the military leadership of Moscow. .
A military column from the Wagner Group was detained on its way to the capital, after the mediation of Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, where part of the mercenaries later moved, despite accusations of treason by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The last images of Prigozhin, who had various business interests and was a man considered to be in Putin’s inner circle, emerged the week of the air disaster, in a video supposedly recorded somewhere in Africa, where the Wagner Group conducts military activities in countries unstable.
Source: TSF
