Russian President Vladimir Putin just isn’t planning to attend the funeral of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin following his dying in a aircraft crash, the Kremlin stated on Tuesday.
“The president’s attendance just isn’t deliberate,” Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated in his day by day phone press briefing, insisting that every one preparations for Prigozhin’s funeral had been being dealt with by his household.
Peskov added that the Kremlin has no info on the date of the funeral and that the choice is being made by “the family and buddies” of the previous Wagner’s chief.
The nation’s high felony investigation company, the Investigative Committee, formally confirmed Prigozhin’s dying on Sunday.
The committee didn’t say what may need prompted Prigozhin’s enterprise jet to plummet from the sky minutes after taking off from Moscow en path to St. Petersburg. Simply earlier than the crash, Prigozhin had returned from a visit to Africa, the place he sought to increase the Wagner Group’s actions.
US says intentional explosion prompted crash
A preliminary US intelligence evaluation concluded that an intentional explosion prompted the aircraft to go down, and Western officers have pointed to an extended record of Putin’s foes who’ve been assassinated.
The Kremlin rejected Western allegations that the Russian president was behind the crash as an “absolute lie.”
The crash got here precisely two months after Prigozhin launched a insurrection towards the Russian army management, main his mercenaries to take over the army headquarters within the southern metropolis of Rostov-on-Don after which launching a march on Moscow.
They downed a number of army plane, killing greater than a dozen pilots. Putin denounced the revolt as “treason” and vowed to punish its perpetrators however hours later struck a deal that noticed Prigozhin ending the mutiny in trade for amnesty and permission for him and his troops to maneuver to Belarus.