Russia-Ukraine War‘It’s Likely Prigozhin Was Killed,’ Pentagon Says

Minutes later, he suggested that his Wagner mercenary force was prepared to go on the offensive against Russia’s own Defense Ministry, saying, “There’s 25,000 of us, and we are going to figure out why chaos is happening in the country.”

Within hours, Russia’s security agencies had announced that the country’s main intelligence agency was opening an investigation into Mr. Prigozhin for armed rebellion.

By early Saturday morning, Wagner forces were in Rostov-on-Don, a southern city near the Ukrainian border, and Mr. Prigozhin posted a video from the region’s military headquarters claiming to have control of the city.

Some Wagner forces then began to push north toward Moscow, meeting little resistance and shooting down a number of Russian military aircraft along the way. Russian troops set up roadblocks around Moscow’s perimeter as Wagner fighters were seen moving toward the capital.

Mr. Putin, in a televised address to the nation, pledged “decisive actions” to quell what he called a treasonous armed rebellion, adding that those who organized the uprising would “face unavoidable punishment.” He did not utter Mr. Prigozhin’s name but suggested he was a traitor.

Then, on Saturday evening, Belarus state media unexpectedly announced that the country’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, had negotiated a deal to halt Mr. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow.

In an audio statement posted to Telegram, Mr. Prigozhin said he had turned around his fighters, who were within 125 miles of the capital, to avoid Russian bloodshed. Soon after, Wagner fighters in Rostov appeared to be packing up their belongings and saluting residents, according to Russian state media.

Under the deal brokered by Mr. Lukashenko, Mr. Prigozhin would go into exile in Belarus, the criminal case against him would be dropped and fighters who rebelled with him would not be prosecuted, according to the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov. The Wagner fighters who didn’t participate in the rebellion would be given the option of signing contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry.

Days later, Belarusian state news media reported that Mr. Prigozhin had arrived in Belarus, and new details emerged about the negotiations that ended the rebellion. Mr. Lukashenko said Mr. Putin had raised the possibility of killing Mr. Prigozhin. But Mr. Lukashenko said that he had urged against a rushed response.

In his first remarks following the rebellion, Mr. Prigozhin denied on the messaging app Telegram that he had any intention of seizing power in his march on Moscow.

The Kremlin later disclosed that Mr. Putin held a lengthy meeting with Mr. Prigozhin and commanders of his Wagner private military company just days after they launched the mutiny.

It remained unclear why Mr. Prigozhin had been allowed back in Moscow, and what continued use Mr. Putin might have seen for the mercenary boss and his group.

Here is a look at several prominent Russians and their mysterious deaths:

Sergey Protosenya

Died April 2022

Who was he? A former chief accountant at Novatek, a major gas company in Russia

How did he die? Mr. Protosenya was found hanged in a coastal Spanish town with an ax and a knife beside him, with his wife and daughter stabbed to death inside. The Spanish police believed the three died in a murder-suicide, according to local reports.

But Novatek released a statement that those reports bore “no relation to reality.” Igor Volobuev, a former vice president at Gazprombank, told CNN that he did not believe the murder-suicide theory. “Did he kill himself? I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he knew something and that he posed some sort of risk.”

Ravil Maganov

Died September 2022

Who was he? The chairman of Lukoil, the largest private corporation in Russia. At the start of the war, Lukoil’s board, overseen by Mr. Maganov, released a statement expressing “deepest concerns about the tragic events in Ukraine” and calling for “the soonest termination of the armed conflict.”

How did he die? He fell from the sixth-floor window of the Central Clinical Hospital, according to a report by Channel 1, the country’s leading state-owned television network. Lukoil released a statement saying that Mr. Maganov “had passed away following a severe illness.” Tass, on the other hand, said that Mr. Maganov’s death was a suicide.

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Anatoly N. Gerashchenko

Died September 2022

Who was he? A top aviation expert and scientist, he was the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, many of whose graduates work in the military-industrial complex.

How did he die? According to Moscow’s tabloids, Mr. Gerashchenko was inspecting the construction of the university’s new building when he fell “from a great height” off a staircase that didn’t have any railings installed.

Pavel Antov

Died December 2022

Who was he? The wealthy founder of the Russian meat conglomerate Vladimir Standard and a member of Parliament in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow

How did he die? During a tourist trip to India, Mr. Antov fell from a hotel’s terrace and later died. His travel companion, Vladimir Budanov, died of cardiac arrest days earlier.

Dmitry Pavochka

Died January 2023

Who was he? A department head at the Higher School of Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship who had previously worked at Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, and Yukos, the now-defunct oil company whose chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned for a decade on trumped-up tax charges in the early years of Mr. Putin’s reign

How did he die? Mr. Pavochka burned to death in a fire after falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette, according to The Moscow Times.

Marina Yankina

Died February 2023

Who was she? The chief financial officer for the Ministry of Defense in the Western Military District, which includes Moscow and St. Petersburg

How did she die? Ms. Yankina appeared to have jumped from the window of her apartment in a high-rise in St. Petersburg, according to various reports.

Pyotr Kucherenko

Died May 2023

Who was he? Russia’s deputy minister of science and higher education

How did he die? According to a statement released by the ministry he worked for, Mr. Kucherenko “became ill on the plane on which the Russian delegation was returning from a business trip to Cuba.” The plane made an emergency landing in a town in Russia near the border with Georgia, where medics were unable to save Mr. Kucherenko.

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Anton Cherepennikov

Died July 2023

Who was he? The founder of Citadel, which owns some of Russia’s biggest makers of digital wiretapping equipment and controls a large chunk of the market for telecommunications monitoring technology. Mr. Cherepennikov was placed under sanctions by the U.S. government in February.

How did he die? The preliminary cause of the 40-year-old’s death was cardiac arrest, according to RBC, a Russian news network. But RTVI, a Russian media website, reported that Mr. Cherepennikov died from an overdose of a “medical gas.”

The city’s fall in May ended the longest battle of the war, giving Russia its most significant territorial advance in months while making clear how reliant Moscow had become on Wagner’s forces.

Over the course of the nearly yearlong fight for the city, Mr. Prigozhin emerged as a populist political figure, excoriating the military leadership in Moscow for corruption while portraying himself and his forces as more ruthless and effective than the Russian military.

In angry recordings and videos posted to the Telegram messaging network, he cast top military and Kremlin officials as unaware and uncaring of the struggles of regular Russian soldiers. The accusations about the competency of the Russian Defense Ministry, paired with his fighters’ advances in Bakhmut, transformed Mr. Prigozhin from a once-secretive figure into a power player on the public stage.

The discord between Mr. Prigozhin and Russian defense officials became more pointed as the first anniversary of the war approached in February.

At that time, Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary group was losing its ability to replenish its ranks. His troops’ sheer numbers — bolstered by prison inmates — had enabled Wagner’s repeated, costly offensives in Bakhmut. But news of Wagner’s astronomical casualty rate was spreading to Russian penal colonies, and Mr. Prigozhin said in early February that he would stop recruiting inmates. He later suggested that the Defense Ministry had barred him from recruiting new fighters from Russian jails to “bleed out” Wagner and deny it victory in Bakhmut.

Not long afterward, he took aim at the defense minister and the country’s most senior general, accusing them of treason in vitriolic, profanity-laden audio messages on social media.

Mr. Prigozhin claimed that military officials were deliberately withholding ammunition and supplies from Wagner fighters in Bakhmut to undermine him, while, he said, Russian forces elsewhere faced failure after failure.

According to a classified U.S. intelligence document that was leaked online in April, the dispute grew so raw that President Vladimir V. Putin became personally involved, calling Mr. Prigozhin and Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22.

Mr. Prigozhin eventually said his fighters in Bakhmut had received the ammunition they needed, and in April, the Russian Defense Ministry made a rare acknowledgment of their cooperation, saying that Russian paratrooper units were covering Wagner’s flanks in the western part of the city.

But over the course of three weeks in May, Mr. Prigozhin issued a series of inflammatory statements. He again accused Russia’s military bureaucracy of starving Wagner forces of ammunition, this time threatening to withdraw them from the city on May 10. He appeared to backtrack two days later, this time saying he had received satisfactory promises of more arms.

In late May, he declared that Bakhmut was fully under Wagner control.

Several hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry released a statement saying that the city’s capture “has been completed” as a result of Wagner’s actions and with the support of traditional Russian forces.

Within days, Mr. Prigozhin said his forces had begun to withdraw from the ruined city. Less than a month later, they were marching on Moscow in what became a short-lived mutiny.

Videos posted to the messaging app Telegram show debris from the aircraft in three locations that span roughly two miles. One site contains the main fuselage of the aircraft, an Embraer Legacy 600; one contains the tail section; and a third contains a smaller piece of debris. The locations of the debris roughly align with the aircraft’s direction of travel.

“Having a debris field that large is unusual if the plane hadn’t taken any structural damage while airborne,” said Ian Williams, the deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Times was unable to confirm exactly what brought the aircraft down, but did not find evidence consistent with a routine mechanical malfunction. Instead, The Times analysis aligns with the leading theory among American and other Western officials: that an explosion on board likely took the plane down.

“Planes don’t often fall straight out of the sky, like straight down like that, unless there’s been something to stop its forward momentum,” Mr. Williams said.

The Pentagon said on Thursday that its initial assessment was that Mr. Prigozhin, who staged a brief mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June, was likely killed in the plane crash. His name was listed on the plane’s manifest, but neither his Wagner mercenary group nor the Russian government have said definitively that he was on the plane and among the 10 people killed in its crash.

Dmitriy Khavin contributed reporting.

One of the individuals is Aymani Nesievna Kadyrova, the mother of the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who is a close ally of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin himself is under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children, as is his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.

The two entities placed under sanctions are a Russian-owned camp and an organization that has overseen Ukrainian children who were sent to a camp in the Chechen Republic.

Seven of the people targeted by the new sanctions are Russian officials, and the other four, including Ms. Kadyrova, have ties to the camps. The sanctions block those targeted from owning or having interests in property in the United States, and block others from providing or receiving funds or services to them.

The State Department also said it was working to impose visa restrictions on three Russia-installed officials in Ukraine involved in human rights abuses of Ukrainian children in connection to their deportation or transferral to camps.

President Biden, in a statement recognizing Ukraine Independence Day on Thursday, said that the sanctions would “hold those responsible for these forced transfers and deportations to account, and to demand that Ukrainian children be returned to their families.”

“These children have been stolen from their parents and kept apart from their families,” he said. “It’s unconscionable.”

At a U.N. Security Council session on Ukraine on Thursday, the U.S. ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that while estimates varied, thousands of Ukrainian children were believed to have been forcibly deported during the war in Ukraine, some of them babies as young as 4 months old.

“Children are literally being ripped from their homes in the year 2023 by a country sitting in this very chamber,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said. “This is straight out of a dystopian novel, but this is not fiction.”

Once at the camps, either in Russia or in Russia-occupied regions of Ukraine, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said, the children are subjected to propaganda, brainwashing, and, in some cases, military training. Some are pressured into accepting Russian citizenship, and others have been adopted by Russian families, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said.

Two sanctions were issued to the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institute International Children Center, or ARTEK, and the Akhmat Kadyrov Foundation, or AKF.

The State Department said that ARTEK was a “summer camp” in Russia-occupied Crimea where Ukrainian children have been placed in “extensive ‘patriotic’ re-education programs and are prevented from returning to their families,” and that AKF has overseen the “re-education” of Ukrainian children in camps located in the Chechen Republic of Russia.

Others placed under the new sanctions were Galina Anatolevna Pyatykh, an adviser to the governor of Belgorod, Russia; Irina Anatolyevna Ageeva, the commissioner for children’s rights in Russia’s Kaluga region; Irina Aleksandrovna Cherkasova, the commissioner for children’s rights in Russia’s Rostov region; Mansur Mussaevich Soltaev, the Chechen commissioner for human rights; Muslim Magomedovich Khuchiev, the chairman of the Chechen government; Konstantin Albertovich Fedorenko, the director of ARTEK; Zamid Alievich Chalaev, a special police battalion commander in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs; Olena Oleksandrivna Shapurova, the minister of education and science in Russia-controlled portions of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region; Vladimir Vladislavovich Kovalenko, the chief of staff of the Sevastopol Branch of the Youth Army, which has organized Russian camps in Crimea; and Vladimir Dmitrievich Nechaev, the Russia-appointed head of a Crimean state university.

“You will hear Russian officials say that their transfers of children are part of humanitarian evacuations,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said on Thursday. “But this is a gross perversion of reality and a futile attempt to justify the unjustifiable.”

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of Germany noted that, although the situation was still unclear, the world could not trust official Russian sources.

“What we know is that we have been lied to for at least a year and a half, and so it is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky two months after he attempted an uprising,” she said in a video broadcast by Deutsche Welle, the German television station.

Olivier Véran, the French government spokesman, said on Thursday that there were “reasonable doubts” about what led to the crash.

“Prigozhin leaves behind him mass graves, leaves behind him a terrible mess in much of the world,” Mr. Véran told France 2 television. “He was the man who did Putin’s dirty work.”

Officials from member countries along NATO’s eastern flank also commented on the fate of the Wagner group and speculated that Mr. Putin orchestrated the crash.

At a news conference broadcast on Poland’s state television station, TVP, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland said that the Wagner group would continue to be used as an extension of Russia’s military strategy.

“It is under the direct tutelage of Putin and his people, and will be used even more than before, or at least to the same extent as it was before: as an instrument of provocation, blackmail and various kinds of harassment in order to disrupt security policy and destabilize countries bordering Russia and Belarus,” Mr. Morawiecki said.

Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister and one of Ukraine’s staunchest backers, told CNN that if Mr. Prigozhin’s death were to be confirmed, “it shows Putin will eliminate opponents and that scares anyone who is thinking of expressing opinion different than his.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

It will be months, at least, before the F-16s arrive in Ukraine. An American official said only last week that the Biden administration would allow allies to send the American-designed jets to Ukraine. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, predicted earlier this week that, after pilot and maintenance training, it would take six to seven months before F-16s were sent, too late to be used in the counteroffensive that Kyiv launched this summer.

Norway’s announcement came as Mr. Store visited the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, for Ukraine’s Independence Day. It follows months of efforts to obtain the jets by the Ukrainian government, which argued that they were needed to achieve air superiority over Russia and beef up its air defenses.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine celebrated the announcement. “The best news for Independence Day!” he said during a news conference in Kyiv with Mr. Store.

Norway also pledged to provide Ukraine with German IRIS-T air defense systems, as Russia continues to pound Ukrainian cities with missile attacks.

Mr. Zelensky added that President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of Portugal, who also visited Kyiv on Thursday, had confirmed that his country was ready to join the coalition of Western countries training Ukrainian pilots and engineers on the F-16s.

Norway’s decision to deliver the jets may add pressure on other countries that have so far been reluctant to do so, out of concerns of antagonizing Moscow or reducing their own military capacities. The United States, which must approve any allied F-16 transfers, resisted approving them for months before yielding to pressure from Britain and the Netherlands.

Even if the Russian authorities were not forthcoming about what happened to the plane, General Milley said he expected the truth to come out.

“Even on things like this, eventually you figure it out,” he told reporters, adding, “I can assure you that, to my knowledge, the United States had nothing to do with any of this whatsoever.”

If the paramilitary leader is indeed dead, there will be repercussions around the world in places where the Wagner Group has troops, said General Milley, President Biden’s most senior military commander.

“If the leadership of Wagner is suddenly killed, there is going to be an effect,” he said. “What that impact is, I don’t know yet.”

Mr. Prigozhin’s possible death puts the United States in a strange position. The mercenary leader has bedeviled U.S. efforts in Ukraine, Syria and West Africa and operated “in an adversarial manner toward U.S. interests,” General Milley said.

But at the same time, U.S. officials had taken some delight in the thorn that Mr. Prigozhin had become in the side of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in recent months. Some wondered whether the forceful removal of the Wagner boss could further embolden the Russian leader.

Like Mr. Biden, General Milley said he was not surprised by the news that a plane tied to the man who led a mutiny against Mr. Putin’s military leadership had suddenly plunged from the sky.

“Prigozhin was probably at some degree of risk because of the mutiny that occurred two months ago,” General Milley said.

“Ukrainian defenders clashed with the occupier’s units,” the statement said. “As a result, the enemy suffered losses among its personnel and destroyed enemy equipment.” Neither claim could be independently verified, nor could the authenticity of a video that the ministry posted, showing a soldier manning a mounted machine gun on what appeared to be a moving boat at nighttime and a Ukrainian flag pinned to the wall of a building.

The claim came on Ukraine’s Independence Day.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other senior Ukrainian officials have said that they intend to retake Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. But while Ukraine has struck military targets in Crimea repeatedly with missiles and drones, there have been few if any previous reports of Ukrainian troops setting foot on the peninsula during the war.

On Thursday, Mr. Zelensky told journalists that the raid had taken place without casualties but said that “it is too early to talk about the liberation of Crimea.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry made no direct reference to any such incident in its daily update on Thursday, although it said that the “actions of one Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group have been suppressed,” without offering details.

Some U.S. military analysts say that retaking Crimea by force might prove an almost insurmountable challenge for Ukraine in the short term, given Russian defenses. Any sustained attempt at a ground assault on the region could come only if Ukrainian forces are able to drive a wedge between the peninsula and the territory that Moscow holds in eastern Ukraine, a key goal of the Ukrainian counteroffensive effort that U.S. and other Western officials say is currently struggling.

As part of the counteroffensive, the tempo of long-distance attacks on Crimea has increased in recent weeks, although it remains unclear if the strikes have affected Russia’s broader operations on the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces struck the Kerch Strait Bridge that joins Crimea and Russia last month with sea drones and also hit a Russian naval vessel. On Wednesday, the spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern forces, Natalia Humeniuk, said Ukraine had destroyed a Russian antimissile battery on the peninsula.

“We have the ability to strike any part of the temporarily occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea,” said Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence, on Ukraine’s Radio Svoboda.

U.S. officials sounded increasingly certain, both publicly and privately, that Mr. Prigozhin was dead, and that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered the killing, intent on removing a figure who had led a short-lived mutiny in June that was seen as the gravest challenge to Mr. Putin’s rule in decades.

Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said the initial U.S. assessment, based on a “variety of factors,” was that Mr. Prigozhin had likely been killed in the crash.

General Ryder did not state a theory for the crash, but said the United States had no information to indicate that a surface-to-air missile brought down the plane. Other officials said American satellite intelligence did not detect a missile launch, and there was no other evidence to suggest a surface-to-air weapon took out the plane. Western governments continue to explore the possibility that an air-to-air missile could have been used, even if an explosion on board remained the more likely scenario.

Analysis by The New York Times of flight data and video from the crash indicates there was most likely at least one catastrophic midair event that occurred several minutes before the private jet crashed. The precipitous drop and widespread debris, experts say, point to an explosion or sudden breaking apart of the aircraft rather than a mechanical failure.

Officials said it appeared probable that Mr. Putin ordered the assassination of Mr. Prigozhin at the same time or shortly after the Russian president removed Gen. Sergei Surovikin from his military command.

The plane crash came only hours after Russian authorities said that General Surovikin had been relieved of his post. General Surovikin, like Mr. Prigozhin, was seen as ruthlessly effective in the Ukraine war. As an ally of Mr. Prigozhin, General Surovikin at least knew about the mercenary leader’s plans and may have even assisted in the rebellion, according to U.S. officials.

During the mutiny, forces from the Wagner paramilitary group, which Mr. Prigozhin founded, took over a key southern city and an armed convoy of mercenaries marched toward Moscow. While Mr. Putin denounced Mr. Prigozhin and the organizers of the rebellion for “betraying their country,” some analysts said the episode made Mr. Putin look weak.

In public comments on Thursday, Mr. Putin did not explicitly confirm the Wagner leader’s death, but he offered his condolences to the families of those who had perished in the crash and said that Russian investigators would pursue the investigation into it “to the end.”

Mr. Putin referred to Mr. Prigozhin in the past tense: “This was a person with a complicated fate. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results.”

Rather than focusing on Mr. Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny, Mr. Putin spoke of Wagner’s effort in Ukraine. Under Mr. Prigozhin’s direction, the paramilitary group played a vital role in taking Bakhmut, the most significant Russian advance in Ukraine since last summer.

On Thursday, Russian news outlets and propaganda efforts focused on the idea that the crashed plane had been brought down by an accident. The information campaign gradually took hold on Russian social media, overwhelming posts speculating that Mr. Prigozhin had been killed on orders of Mr. Putin or by a bomb on the plane, according to Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs AI, which tracks public sentiment in Russia.

Russian internet posts also contained clues about what might have brought down the plane.

Videos posted on the messaging app Telegram show debris from the aircraft in three locations that span across two miles. One site contains the main fuselage of the aircraft, an Embraer Legacy 600, one contains the tail section, and a third contains a piece of smaller debris. The locations of the debris roughly align with the aircraft’s direction of travel.

Raw flight tracking data from FlightRadar24 shows the plane experienced a sudden drop in altitude around 6:19 p.m. local time. The aircraft remained in the air for some time before free falling from the sky approximately 30 miles (48 kilometers) away, according to an analysis of video capturing the crash and debris fields.

“Having a debris field that large is unusual if the plane hadn’t taken any structural damage while airborne,” said Ian Williams, the deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Times analysis did not confirm exactly what brought the aircraft down, but did not find evidence of a routine mechanical malfunction.

“Planes don’t often fall straight out of the sky, like straight down like that, unless there’s been something to stop its forward momentum,” Mr. Williams said.

U.S. officials are tracking closely what might become of the Wagner group without Mr. Prigozhin and other key leaders. In addition to Mr. Prigozhin, Dmitry Utkin, a former special forces and intelligence officer who was Wagner’s second in command, is believed to have died in the plane crash, along with other top officials of the mercenary group.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there would most likely be repercussions in countries where Wagner has put troops.

“If the leadership of Wagner is suddenly killed, there is going to be an effect,” General Milley said. “What that impact is, I don’t know yet.”

While Mr. Prigozhin had pulled his forces out of the fight in Ukraine, Wagner remains active in Africa, one of the primary ways Russia has expanded its influence on the continent.

Though Mr. Prigozhin was seen as an enemy of the United States, American officials had watched with interest how Mr. Prigozhin had become a thorn in Mr. Putin’s side. As a result, American officials said, Mr. Putin clearly thought he had no choice but to take action.

But officials were divided on Thursday over whether Mr. Putin would emerge stronger or weaker inside Russia, and some simply did not want to entertain the question.

Officials were looking closely at how much of the Wagner group Mr. Putin would be able to bring under his command. One of the causes of the mutiny was an effort by the Russian defense ministry to demand that any Russians fighting in Ukraine work for the government. Since the rebellion, the Kremlin has worked to bring Wagner forces under its control.

One U.S. official said that in the aftermath of Mr. Prigozhin’s presumed death, Mr. Putin could struggle to put an ally in charge. Wagner, the official said, was likely to choose its new leader — most likely one loyal to Mr. Prigozhin.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from London, and John Ismay from Washington.

Mr. Putin branded the actions a “betrayal,” a notable choice of words for a Russian leader who came up through the KGB and once called betrayal an unforgivable act.

“This is a knife in the back of our country and our people,” Mr. Putin said, noting that “inflated ambitions and personal interests” had led to “treason.”

Mr. Putin refused to mention the tycoon by name, his common practice with those he views as enemies. The Russian leader vowed harsh punishment.

So the response was collective puzzlement when hours later the Kremlin announced a deal to end the mutiny, whereby fighters for Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner forces — who had fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine and across Africa — would escape punitive measures and Mr. Prigozhin would leave for Belarus without facing prosecution.

Some Kremlinologists theorized that Mr. Prigozhin escaped because he was too useful to the Kremlin, both in Africa, and potentially once again in Ukraine.

Others predicted a denouement that had yet to come.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the next day, “I don’t think we’ve seen the final act.” President Biden, asked about Mr. Prigozhin the following month, said, “If I were he, I would be careful what I ate.”

For two months, Mr. Prigozhin functioned as a kind of ghost.

He moved around Russia stealthily. He ceased releasing public statements. He slipped back into the shadows from which he had emerged the previous year.

Mr. Putin, all the while, chipped away at the mercenary chief’s stature.

The Russian president emphasized that Wagner had been fully funded by the Russian state. The Russian defense ministry announced that it had collected the private military outfit’s vast arsenal of weaponry. Russian authorities set about dismantling the tycoon’s business empire.

Five days after the mutiny, during a meeting with Wagner’s top leadership at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin asked the commanders if they would be prepared to fight under a different leader, according to an interview the Russian leader gave to the newspaper Kommersant. Mr. Putin claimed he saw many heads nod in agreement, before Mr. Prigozhin, who was seated in front of the fighters and couldn’t see their faces, refused.

Legally speaking, Wagner doesn’t even exist, Mr. Putin told the paper, noting that Russian law didn’t allow for private military companies.

In late July, Mr. Prigozhin popped up in St. Petersburg while the Russia-Africa was taking place, giving rise to speculation that he may have retained his influence at least as the Kremlin’s go-to man in Africa.

The mercenary tycoon sought to propagate that idea in a video he released earlier this week, his first since the days of the mutiny.

Appearing in military fatigues in a place he said was 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), he said Wagner fighters were carrying out search and reconnaissance activities, “making Russia greater on all continents and making Africa even freer.”

The following day, a private jet with Mr. Prigozhin’s name on the passenger manifest went down on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

But the approach is now changing to also bring several Ukrainian pilots and dozens of maintenance and other support personnel for training in the United States as soon as Ukraine identifies them, Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters.

“We want to do everything we can to help move this effort along as quickly as possible in support of Ukraine,” he said.

The decision was announced on Thursday, timed to Ukraine’s Independence Day.

But it will be months, at least, before the F-16s are sent to battle. It was only last Thursday that a U.S. official said the Biden administration would allow allies to send the American-designed jets to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, predicted this week that it would take six to seven months before F-16s were sent to Ukraine, following training for the country’s pilots and necessary support staff. That means the planes will not play a role in Ukraine’s current counteroffensive.

“This is about the long-term support to Ukraine,” General Ryder said. “This is not about the counteroffensive that they’re conducting right now.”

The pilots will first receive English-language training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, in September. Then in October, they will start months of flight training from the Air National Guard’s 162nd Wing at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Ariz., which has trained aviators from 25 countries, General Ryder said.

The Ukrainian pilots will take several courses, the general said, including basic flight maneuvers and weapons as well as more advanced instruction in combat tactics. It could take five to eight months to certify each pilot, depending on their previous flying experience, he said.

“We’re going to work as fast as we can,” General Ryder said. “But what you don’t want to do is rush a pilot and train them in a high-performance combat aircraft, and then put them in harm’s way not fully prepared.”

A small number of Ukrainian pilots had received training in the United States before President Biden decided in May to allow European countries with U.S.-made F-16s to train Ukrainian aviators.

This past winter, the U.S. Air Force hosted two Ukrainian pilots who had flown Soviet-era jets to see how they would fare on the F-16. In an assessment dated March 22, Air Force officials concluded that at least some Ukrainian pilots could be trained to fly the F-16 in four to five months.

The assessment was based on a 12-day evaluation of the two Ukrainian pilots who underwent flight simulations at the Morris air base over the winter. It found that the two pilots still needed certain technical skills, including understanding the Western cockpit’s instruments and becoming comfortable flying in American-standard formation with other aircraft.

Norway said on Thursday that it would donate F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, which would make it the third NATO country to do so after the Netherlands and Denmark. And Portugal said it also would train Ukrainian pilots and engineers to fly or maintain the F-16s.

With the new commitment, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has estimated that his country will receive at least 61 F-16s — enough for as many as four squadrons.

Independence Day in Ukraine commemorates the country’s 1991 break from the Soviet Union, but also increasingly serves as a rallying point for Ukrainians to assert their identity and aspirations. Again, there were no public celebrations for this year’s national holiday — which also comes 18 months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Families hung around in the heat, speaking quietly. Ukrainian troops looked on as teenagers took selfies among the detritus of their struggles on the battlefield. Children wore baggy battalion T-shirts and Post Malone swag. A terrier, dressed in a pet-size Ukrainian vyshyvanka, a traditional embroidered shirt, trotted past a soldier who was on crutches, his right foot missing.

A young boy shouted, “Mom, why do the tanks look like this?” She explained: “They were on fire, and then the sun, wind and rain also did their work over time.”

Twin girls in matching dresses scampered by. Their mother, older brother and father followed behind. The girls pointed to the ground and the mud that had dried on the wheels of a Russian tank: “Look, the grass is still here.”

Indeed, even after being trucked from the battlefield to supply depots to downtown Kyiv, there were still pieces of the war on the destroyed vehicles’ hulls. Shell casings, melted ballistic glass, charred wood. Graffiti had appeared, too, with some of it commemorating the cities and towns ravaged by fighting: For Pisky, For Kramatorsk, For Melitopol, For Mariupol, For Sumy.

At the Maidan, home to the mass democracy protests that began in late 2013 and became a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s long collision course with Russia, relatives of soldiers in Ukraine’s 77th Airmobile Brigade tried to use the interest in the parade of tanks to draw attention to the plight of their sons and husbands, around 170 of whom had been missing for months, they said.

“People are more interested in machinery than in our problems,” said Nina Tkachenko, 46. Her husband had disappeared outside Bakhmut in January, she said, adding that the government had offered little help in her search for answers. She gestured to a poster of missing soldiers from the 77th.

“Every single life is an individual existence of a person who sacrificed themselves for the peace here,” she said.

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Marc Santora contributed reporting.

The aircraft then made erratic ascents and descents of several hundred feet in the space of about 12 seconds before suddenly dropping some 8,000 feet for about 20 seconds. When the jet last transmitted data, at about 6:20 p.m., it was flying at 19,725 feet.

“It is this data that provides some insight into the final moments of the flight,” Flightradar24 said, noting that it showed a “dramatic descent.”

The plane’s sudden plunge was also captured in an unconfirmed video released by Russian state media that appeared to show it rapidly falling nose-first from the sky, leaving a plume of smoke or steam behind.

Chris Lomas, an aviation content specialist for Flightradar24, said it was impossible to determine the cause of the crash. But he confirmed that the plane had first cruised “apparently without any issue” before plummeting.

Mr. Lomas said that the jet’s brief ascents and descents may have been a sign of “an attempt to respond in some way” to the event that eventually led the plane to crash.

Embraer, the Brazilian maker of the Legacy 600 private jet associated with Mr. Prigozhin, said that it had stopped providing any support for the aircraft in 2019 because of sanctions. That support is largely maintenance-related and can potentially include data monitoring, but it is unclear if that was the case with the jet.

A person who answered the phone at a morgue in the Russian region of Tver, where emergency workers reportedly took remains recovered from the crash site, refused to answer questions or provide any information about when the victims would be identified.

Russian state news media focused attention on the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, where President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared by video link to welcome the eventual addition of six more countries to the group of emerging economies.

The state news channel Rossiya-24 aired a short segment on Thursday morning, saying only that emergency personnel were working on the site of a private plane crash in the Tver region. The report mentioned in passing that Mr. Prigozhin and his associates had been on the passenger list for the jet, citing the civil aviation authorities.

The news channel otherwise alternated between live coverage of the BRICS summit and reporting on battlefield developments in Ukraine.

Russian state news networks are known to receive guidance from the Kremlin on their news agenda and messaging. After major, unexpected news events, the networks sometimes hesitate in the initial hours, limiting coverage to bare-bones reporting.

Later on Thursday, Olga Skabeyeva, the host of a talk show on state television, narrated a “special report” that focused on the investigation of the crash site, while minimizing discussion of Mr. Prigozhin and making no mention of the mutiny. She said that Russian investigators were examining all possible causes of the crash, including “piloting mistakes, technical malfunctions and external influences,” then turned to discussing Western news media coverage of the incident.

Mr. Putin is known for deliberately ignoring people he sees as political enemies in his public remarks, avoiding saying their names to deny them attention and status. Mr. Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny in late June represented perhaps the biggest threat to the Russian leader’s rule since he took power about 23 years ago.

If Mr. Prigozhin is confirmed dead, how the Russian authorities will handle his funeral is unclear. The mercenary leader has received the Hero of Russia designation, which generally accords special funeral procedures.

Already, videos have surfaced showing Russians creating makeshift memorials to Mr. Prigozhin in St. Petersburg, his base of operations, and other cities. One unverified video from Novosibirsk, circulated on the Telegram messaging app, shows a man wearing military fatigues and the patch of Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner group crying in front of a makeshift memorial to the tycoon.

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.