The destruction of the private plane of Yevgueni Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner Group, claimed the lives of ten people on Wednesday. Russia’s Federal Aviation Administration Rosaviatsia has released a list of the names of those who allegedly landed on board the plane, an Embraer Legacy 600, registration RA-02795. There were no survivors. Awaiting the results of the autopsy, seven high-ranking members of the mercenary company were on the plane, including Prigozhin and his deputy at Wagner, Dmitry Utkin, two pilots and a flight attendant.
On June 23–24, after his confrontation with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Kremlin leadership, Prigozhin crossed the Rubicon by taking the city of Rostov-on-Don and marching his military towards Moscow to demand the incumbent’s ouster. Defense. After 24 critical hours, he gave up his mutiny with a guarantee from Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that his safety would not be compromised.
Prigozhin’s number two, the enigmatic Dmitry Utkin (Sverdlovsk, 1970), was also on the list of those on board the crashed plane. Unlike Prigozhin, known as Putin’s cook, the former commander of Army Intelligence (GRU) never appeared in public. The name of the Wagner company goes back to him, since his name was the surname of the German composer during the war.
Utkin, along with other Russian commanders (like Strelkov of the FSB, who was arrested today for his criticism of the high command), participated in the paramilitary actions that sparked the war in Donbas in the spring of 2014, as protests in Donetsk and Lugansk died down. According to the Russian media RBK, there was also an intervention in Syria. In 2016, he performed at an event where Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded him the Order of Courage.
The soldier is also known for leaking a photo of himself with various Nazi Waffen SS emblems tattooed on his body. Despite the Kremlin’s assertions that its goal is the denazification of Ukraine, Rusich, a unit of the “musicians”, [el apodo que reciben los miembros de Wagner] Its emblem is the Black Sun, another Nazi symbol.
Another occupant of the plane was Valeri Chekalov (Vladivostok, 1976). According to the Saint Petersburg newspaper “Fontanka”, nicknamed “Rover”, he was Wagner’s third mainstay and responsible for his logistics. He was head of the Neva company, which had numerous cross-deals with Prigozhin’s companies, and director of his company Evro Polis, which in 2017 won a lucrative contract from the Syrian regime to provide protection for its oil and gas assets. in exchange for a quarter of their hydrocarbons.
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Little is known about other suspected deceased, although some media suggest they were among Prigozhin’s escort. On board the plane was a Syrian veteran, Yevgueni Makarian (38 years old). Nicknamed Makar, he was on Ukraine’s list of enemies of Mirotvorets, his father was acquitted in a murder trial more than a decade ago, and he had joined the mercenaries in 2016. With Makaryan was Sergei Propustin, nicknamed Kedr, and a member of Wagner 2015 since, and mercenary Alexander Totmin (Altai, 31 years old), who is also on the Mirotvorets list for trading in Sudan. There is no information about another inmate of the facility, Nikolai Matuseev.
The commander of the plane was called Alexei Lyovshin. Vesti Novosibirsk newspaper interviewed a Su-34 fighter-bomber pilot of the same name at an air show in 2018, although it was not confirmed if they were the same person. No details of his biography are known about his co-pilot Rustam Karimov.
Also on board the device was a woman, cabin crew member Kristina Raspopova (Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, 39 years old). On the morning of the tragedy, he posted a photo on his social media showing his breakfast and a suitcase with the inscription “Cabin.” According to the channel 74.ru, the victim was the older sister of the deputy prosecutor of the city of Yemanschelinsk in the Chelyabinsk region.
A source for this channel reports that Raspopova went to Moscow to pursue a career. There she was hired by the company MNT Aero and did not tell her family that she was going to travel with the leader of the mercenaries, only “with someone important”. “All I knew was that he was working on a corporate jet that is rented out to anyone who can afford it,” said a person close to the victim.
From prison to running a millionaire business
Much has been written about the career of Prigozhin (born 1961 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg) since he began speaking out against his great rival, Minister Shoigu, late last year. In his youth he spent nine years in a Soviet prison for robbery, but the economic crisis that Russia was going through in the 1990s gave him a new chance.
As the founder of the catering company Concord, Prigozhin met the rising Russian elite at his restaurants in the city where Putin was simultaneously on his way to the presidency. He never left the Restoration, but gradually took over the dirty work of the Kremlin. He founded the troll factory that stirred up social networks and elections in some western countries; and founded the Wagner Group in 2014. The mercenary company would act as an arm of the army in those actions abroad that the Kremlin refused to credit, from supporting the Syrian regime in the Donbass to protecting African governments in return their mines. For all of this he gained millionaire benefits.
Unlike Shoigu, Prigozhin did not belong to Putin’s inner circle. He could not even defeat his enemy in St. Petersburg, the city’s governor, who refused him many offers. His confrontation with the defense minister escalated when Wagner bled to death in the Bachmut offensive earlier this year, demanding the arrival of ammunition. If he still called Shoigu a “slut” in the spring, Prigozhin’s tone went even further and in May pointed directly to the Russian leader for not receiving weapons: “And the happy grandfather thinks that he is fine.”
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