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The private Embraer legacy Aircraft took off for St Petersburg from Moscow. According to the Russian authorities’ disclosure at 17:00 GMT, there were no survivors at the plane crash site. It is Kuzhenkino in the Tver region where the private jet plane crashed. TASS news agency stated that there were three crew members along with seven passengers on the board and all of them killed.

As per Reuters report, all the passengers with Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, Wagner commander, were attending a meeting with Russia’s Defense ministry people. The Wagner Group’s Telegram channel disclosed the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin. The group has called him a hero and a patriot and the unidentified people behind the crash as traitors to Russia.    

Yevgeny Progozhin was a mercenary leader and Russian oligarch. Before his rebellion in June 2023, he was a close confidant of Vladimir Putin, the Russian President. Due to his ownership of the catering companies and restaurants giving services to the Kremlin, Prigozhin was also referred to as Putin's Chef. He had control over several influential companies, including the Wagner Private Military that had support from the Russian state authorities. 

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin or Yevgeny Prigozhin was born on the 1st June in 1961 in Leningrad, Soviet Union. His parents, Viktor Yevgenyevich Prigozhin and Violetta Kirovna Prigozhina, were a mining engineer and a hospital nurse. His father died when he was only 9 years old. Progozhin completed his school education from Leningrad Sports Boarding School Number 62 in 1977. After an injury, he left his sports career and became a fitness trainer at a children’s sports school. 

At the age of 18 in 1979, he was alleged for stealing and jailed for 2.6 years. It was 1981 when he was sentenced for twelve years for theft, robbery, stealing, and fraud. Due to his good behavior, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reduced his imprisonment time to ten years from 12 years in 1988. After his release in 1990, he started pursuing a pharmaceutical degree from the Leningrad Chemical and Pharmaceutical Institute, but failed. Thereafter, he started encouraging prisoners to join the Wagner Group. 

During 1991 to 1997, he ran a grocery business and became the manager and 15% stakeholder of Contrast, which was the first grocery store in St Petersburg. He got into gambling business. In 1995, he also went into the restaurant business. And with the support of the Contrast director, he opened his first restaurant, Old Customs House, in St Petersburg. After that, he kept going on in the expansion of his restaurant business by opening one restaurant after one. He initially refused, but accepted himself as a founder of the Wagner Group. He founded it in 2014 to support the Russian forces in Donbass war. The acceptance date was 26 September 2022. By supporting the Russian forces in several missions, including Ukraine Invasion in 2022, he got very close to the Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, some conflicts and misunderstandings made him rebel. And it was 23 June 2023 when he officially went against Putin saying that the Ukraine invasion was based on lies.