Russian President Vladimir Putin has no plans to attend the funeral of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in the crash of his plane last week, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.
Prigozhin’s private jet traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed north of Moscow on August 23, killing all ten people on board.
It is still unclear what caused the crash of the plane carrying Chief Wagner. However, villagers near the crash site told Reuters they heard an explosion and then saw the jet fall.
When asked if the Russian president would attend Prigoshin’s funeral, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said in Moscow, “The president does not wish to attend the funeral.”
Peskov said the Kremlin had no specific information about the funeral plans, and the information is with Prigoshin’s relatives.
The day after the accident, President Putin expressed his condolences to Prigoshin’s family and said he had known Prigozhin since the very challenging years of the early 1990s.
The crash that killed Prigozhin came two months after he and his mercenaries launched a mutiny against Putin’s top military commanders, seizing control of the southern city of Rostov, coming within 200 kilometers of the capital, and then stopped their conspiracy.
