A 40-second clip of an old interview in which Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin said he would rather be killed than lie to his country, and talked about a plane disintegrating in the sky, unleashed a flood of online theorizing on Sunday about his presumed death.
Russia's aviation authority said the Wagner group chief was on a private jet that crashed northwest of Moscow with no survivors on Wednesday, exactly two months after he led a failed mutiny against Moscow army chiefs. The Kremlin said Western suggestions he had been killed on its orders were an "absolute lie."
In the clip, taken from an interview originally published on April 29 with Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov, Prigozhin said Russia was on the brink of disaster because the defense establishment was gradually kicking out truth-tellers who refused to suck up to upper management.