Wagner leader's plane crashes
The Russian news agency TASS reported that Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was also on the private jet that crashed in Tver, killing 10 people. TASS reported, citing the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya), that Prigozhin was on the private jet that crashed in Tver. On the other hand, some Telegram channels known to be close to Wagner claimed that the plane was shot down by defense systems belonging to the Russian army. The Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) reported that the plane that crashed in Tver belonged to a company called “MNT-Aero” and that an investigation into the causes of the crash was being conducted by a special commission. The Russian Emergencies Ministry also made a statement announcing that 10 people, including the three crew members, died when the private plane traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed in the Tver region. The passenger list on the plane included Prigozhin, his assistant and one of the founders of Wagner, Dmitry Utkin, as well as Sergey Propustin, Yevgeniy Makaryan, Aleksandr Totmin, Valery Chekalov, and Nikolay Matuseyev. It was announced that the three crew members who lost their lives were Alexei Levshin, Rustam Karimov, and Kristina Raspopova. Prigozhin and the mercenaries he accompanied started an armed rebellion against the Russian administration on June 24. The rebellion ended with the intervention of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Biden: I was not surprised US President Joe Biden said, "I don't know what happened in the plane crash in Russia, but I was not surprised," regarding the private plane crash that crashed in the Tver region of Russia. When asked whether "Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind this incident" in the plane crash in Russia, Biden said, "There is very little in Russia that Putin is not involved in. But I don't know enough yet to know the answer to that."