Who Killed Prigozhin?

If reports from Russia are to be believed — and they were widely picked up by the U.S. and European press on Wednesday afternoon — then Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group, was killed when his private jet crashed on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Although there was no confirmation of Prigozhin's death, several reports from Russia said that the name of the man behind the June mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin was indeed on the flight manifest, with nine others. All are presumed dead.

Confirmed or not, reports of the warlord's death evolved within an hour into questions among Kremlin-watchers asking, "Who killed Prigozhin?"

Wagner-related social media claimed that people on the ground heard "two large bangs" shortly before the plane crash and that Russian air defense "shot down the plane."

Some claimed Putin approved the shooting of the small plane, in which Prigozhin reportedly flew almost exclusively, while others said it was Prigozhin's arch-nemesis, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who gave the order.

"This had to be a decision by Putin," David Satter, onetime Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times and author of five acclaimed books on Russia, said. "Shoigu is a creature of Putin's."

"To my knowledge, it was not Ukraine behind it," Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma and now a leader of the "shadow parliament" of Russian expatriates in Ukraine, said. "And as much as we wanted to do the same, we did not have equipment on the ground to do it. So I think we should point fingers at Kremlin, but I have doubts it was Putin's orders. I think it was Shoigu's AMDs [anti-missile defense weapons] at work. So the split in the inner circle [around Putin] is widening."

Ponomarev explained that "Putin would have done it through the FSB [Russia's intelligence agency and successor to the KGB] through a bomb in the plane, or engine failure, or poisoning. FSB has no AMD. And I still believe Prigozhin was loyal to Putin."

As much as he was denounced by Putin following the brief uprising in June, Prigozhin has long insisted he was loyal to the Russian strongman and simply wanted the resignation of Shoigu — with whom he has long clashed over the independence of his Wagner Group from the Russian armed forces.

Ironically, on the same day as the incident that may have killed Prigozhin, General Viktor Afzalov was appointed acting commander-in-chief of the Russian Aerospace Force to replace General Sergei Surovikin — considered an ally of Prigozhin, who vanished from view shortly after the June mutiny.