WSJ: Wagner chief used jets to evade tracking for years

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has published an article claiming that mercenary leader moved around Russia, blocked surveillance and eluded sanctions until assassination in plane crash. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Long before his private jet plunged from the sky, Yevgeny Prigozhin suspected it could be the stage for his assassination.

The Embraer Legacy 600 was one of several private jets the chief of the Wagner mercenary firm outfitted with equipment to detect surveillance, electronically tinted smart windows and white leather seats.

Aboard, Prigozhin sought to evade a growing dragnet of sanctions and wanted lists, according to former Russian air force officers, Wagner defectors, African and Middle Eastern officials and other people familiar with his travel routine.

His jets, often setting off from Moscow’s Chkalovsky Air Force Base or nearby civilian airports to visit clients in Syria, Libya or across the Sahara, would regularly turn off their transponders, vanishing from plane tracking screens. Crews, known to carry fake passports, would revise passenger lists just before takeoff, then radio air-traffic control midflight to announce a sudden change of destination.

From his time as a youth on the same tough St. Petersburg streets as Vladimir Putin, through his stints in prison and role as Russia’s most influential war entrepreneur, until finally becoming the only member of Putin’s inner circle to challenge him, Prigozhin spent a lifetime honing his ability to live on the run. 

It wasn’t enough to save him.

The 62-year-old military entrepreneur’s jet came down in a patch of meadow about 40 miles from Putin’s lakeside residence on Aug. 23, killing all on board.

U.S. officials have assessed that the plane crashed as the result of an assassination plot. The Russian government has said it is investigating the cause of the crash but hasn’t offered an explanation. It bulldozed the site, despite international safety norms that call for preserving it. 

In the years before the crash, Prigozhin and his crew put in place elaborate measures to mask his flight plans, testing the limits of how easily an international fugitive could jet through dozens of foreign airports undetected. 

To track Prigozhin’s movements, The Wall Street Journal reviewed flight records provided by Flightradar24, an aircraft-tracking service, since at least 2020.

The U.S., which along with some 30 other countries sanctioned the warlord and his companies in recent years, had offered a $10 million reward for his capture and leaned on African partners including Niger to block his plane from landing or being serviced crossing the Sahara. 

The Treasury Department barred U.S. citizens and companies from servicing or engaging with his planes and yachts after his social media troll farm churned out thousands of fake accounts that spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 presidential election. In April, a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft appeared to follow one of his Wagner group airlifters about 70 miles off the coast of Syria and Lebanon, according to flight data from ADSB Exchange, another tracker. 

The mainstay of his fleet, the roughly $10 million Embraer Legacy 600, had changed its registration and jurisdiction several times since a Seychelles-based company linked to Prigozhin acquired it in 2018 from a firm registered in the British tax haven of Isle of Man, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.

Prigozhin would sometimes shuffle between two or three different jets for a single one-way journey to the African countries where Wagner has contracts to protect leaders and national military juntas. Before landing he would question his crew on how closely ground staff would interact with the aircraft.

He frequently conducted meetings in disguise or on runways in his jet in case he was threatened with capture and had to make a swift exit. Last October, Prigozhin landed at an air base in eastern Libya to meet Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar, dressed in a military uniform, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard and flanked by a security detail. Gleb Irisov, a former Russian air force officer, said he regularly bumped into Prigozhin at the Chkalovsky air base, boarding flights to Africa surrounded by bodyguards.

Prigozhin stepped up security measures further after his aborted June mutiny, in which he threatened to march his mercenary army to Moscow. When flying inside Russia, he stopped flying out of the Moscow air base or other Russian military airstrips, and also stopped using government jets from the Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Management, according to people familiar with the situation.

He set out on his final Africa tour in August from a sleepy commercial airport 20 miles southeast of the capital, adding himself to the passenger list shortly before takeoff.

"Some serious mistakes"

Russia’s state-controlled press is full of speculation about the cause of the crash, which also killed Wagner deputy Dmitry Utkin and other close associates. 

Speaking to the nation after the explosion, Putin called Prigozhin an old friend from the 1990s who “made some serious mistakes in life.”

Social media channels considered close to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, suggested Prigozhin’s security protocols had weakened in the months before the flight. Other channels have pointed to uncorroborated testimony of aircrew who cited unusual repairs ahead of the final flight or the visit of two men who said they were prospective buyers of the jet, hours before the crash. 

“Prigozhin travels a lot so there’s your opportunity” to have him killed, said Dan Hoffman, former CIA station chief in Moscow. He likened Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin to a scene in “The Godfather” when Michael Corleone tells the traitor Carlo Rizzi he will be exiled to Las Vegas, only to have him murdered minutes later. 

Prigozhin had once counted himself among the few loyalists in the shrinking circle of hard-liners around the autocrat. After the failed mutiny, the Putin-Prigozhin relationship became murkier. In a speech several days after, Putin revealed his government had financed most of Wagner’s operating expenses, after years denying the government funding.

Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, claimed to have persuaded Putin not to move ahead with a preset plan to execute Prigozhin. Wagner was invited to decamp to Belarus, and Prigozhin arrived at an airfield outside Minsk in the Embraer Legacy 600 as the country was constructing 300 tents for his fighters. On Aug. 1, that tent city began to vanish from satellite pictures, as authorities apparently dismantled it.

After that, Prigozhin began to reappear in videos and voice memos, promising to expand Wagner’s footprint in Africa. He offered mercenaries to the military regime that in July seized power in Niger.

A few days before his death, he used a Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-76 jet to fly from Central African Republic to Mali, where he posed with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.” On the way, he avoided the airspace of Nigeria, whose government has been unsettled by Russia’s support for military governments in West Africa.

Flying visits

The jet that crashed was present at pivotal moments in Wagner’s international expansion.

In Sudan, just days after 2019 street protests toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir, it landed in Khartoum carrying high-ranking Russian military officials, according to Sudanese officials. The delegation, including Igor Osipov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, met with the governing military council to discuss how Russian private military assistance could help them face down swelling nationwide protests.

A week later, the jet traveled the same route from Moscow carrying senior Sudanese officials including Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces, an infamous paramilitary group accused of war crimes in the restive Darfur province. The commander, who goes by the mononym Hemedti, became Prigozhin’s key partner in Sudan, supplying him gold taken from mines the paramilitary group was able to expand and secure with equipment and arms provided by Wagner.

Prigozhin was present at several key meetings in Khartoum around that time but often traveled under a pseudonym, according to Sudanese officials who saw him at the Republican Palace and were briefed on the meetings.

The Embraer Legacy 600 jet was beginning to attract the attention of Russian journalists and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which added the jet and Autolex, the registered Seychelles owner, to sanctions in September 2019.

Shortly after, Prigozhin deregistered it and re-registered it to a St. Petersburg company, Trans Logistik. 

Now registered as RA-02795, the jet was used to fly leaders of the Central African Republic in June 2021 from St. Petersburg, where they attended the international economic forum, to their capital city Bangui.

U.S. officials, which had begun tracking the plane, asked African allies to monitor it and enforce sanctions. The government of Niger agreed to block Prigozhin’s planes from its airspace, jeopardizing his ability to fly across the vast Saharan desert.

Within days of his June mutiny, Prigozhin was back on the Embraer Legacy 600, shuttling between a military air base in Belarus, Moscow and St. Petersburg. At the end of July, he flew to St. Petersburg to try to network on the margins of a Russia-Africa summit hosted by Putin that he wasn’t allowed to officially attend. 

Back in Russia after the final trip to Africa, he again took off in his Embraer Legacy 600 jet from Moscow bound for St. Petersburg on Aug. 23. 

The plane vanished from flight-tracking websites. U.S. officials, monitoring for signs of a surface-to-air missile, saw none, and concluded the explosion was caused by some alternative form of sabotage, such as an onboard bomb. Flightradar24 reported Prigozhin’s plane falling rapidly from about 28,000 feet before it stopped transmitting.

On Tuesday, the warlord was buried in a short and sparsely attended service in his hometown’s Porokhovskoye cemetery.

In an undated video statement that circulated on Russian social media in recent days, Prigozhin used eerily prescient language to describe what he thought was happening to the Russian state.  

“You better kill me, but I won’t lie,” he says. “I have to be honest: Russia is on the brink of disaster. If these cogs are not adjusted today, the plane will fall apart in midair.”