Russia: Wagner mercenaries gather at funeral of Prigozhin's logistics chief

Despite the Kremlin’s claim that President Vladimir Putin had no intentions to attend Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, Russian mercenaries gathered on Tuesday for the funeral of one of Prigozhin’s assistants who died alongside his employer in an aircraft crash last week.

Numerous individuals, some of whom Reuters identified as Wagner mercenaries, joined the family of Valery Chekalov, the head of Wagner logistics, at the Severnoye cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia’s ancient imperial capital.

A Reuters video showed a Russian Orthodox priest praying and swinging a censer in front of Chekalov’s casket as friends, family, and former coworkers bid him farewell, some holding bouquets of flowers.

Some approached his casket to kiss it, including women and children wearing sunglasses. At the funeral, unidentified mourners asked a Reuters photographer and videographer to cease recording.

On August 23, the private Embraer Legacy 600 jet carrying Prigozhin from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed in the Tver region to the north of Moscow, killing all 10 people on board, including Chekalov, another top Wagner leader, Dmitry Utkin, and four men who were reportedly Prigozhin’s bodyguards.

The cause of the plane crash is yet unknown, but people close to the area told Reuters they heard a blast and witnessed the plane crash to the ground.

When asked if Putin would attend the funeral of Prigozhin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “The presence of the president is not envisaged.”

According to Peskov, the Kremlin was unaware of any precise details of the burial plans and left it up to the relatives to make those decisions. The date of Prigozhin’s funeral was not immediately known.

Putin expressed his sympathies to the families of the deceased the day following the collision and mentioned that he had known Prigozhin for a very long time, going back to the turbulent early 1990s.

“He was a man with a difficult fate, and he made serious mistakes in life,” Putin said, while describing him as a talented businessman.

The incident happened two months to the day after Prigozhin and his hired guns staged a coup against Putin’s top military leaders, seizing control of Rostov in the south and making their way towards Moscow before turning around 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the capital.

Since Putin’s ascension to power on the final day of 1999, the mutiny has constituted the biggest threat to his authority. The claim made by certain Western politicians and analysts that Putin ordered Prigozhin’s murder in retaliation has been dismissed by the Kremlin as a “absolute lie” despite the fact that these individuals have not offered any supporting documentation.

President of the United States Joe Biden stated last week that he was not surprised by the death and that not much in Russia happened without Putin’s involvement.

Two pilots and a flight attendant were among the ten individuals killed in the disaster, and investigators announced on Sunday that genetic testing had verified their identities in all of the victims.

(With agency inputs)