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| - On Aug. 23, 2023, a plane with 10 passengers aboard, allegedly including the chief of the Wagner Group's mercenary forces, Yevgeny Prigozhin, reportedly crashed just north of Moscow.
Prigozhin made headlines earlier in the year by leading an armed rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government military forces.
The plane crash was widely seen as an assassination to avenge a mutiny that challenged Putin, The AP reported.
In the hours after the crash, Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) and captioned it with the claim that the clip "allegedly shows the moment of the crash of Prigozhin's plane."
A video appeared, which allegedly shows the moment of the crash of Prigozhin's plane. pic.twitter.com/KkTmw7LoH9
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 23, 2023
However, this video was not new, as BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh posted:
This video, claiming to show the deadly crash of a plane carrying Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been viewed nearly a million times.
It shows the shooting down of a Russian Ilyushin Il-22M aircrat during Wagner's mutiny in June. pic.twitter.com/ms4BaQ0HkZ
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) August 23, 2023
This clip had been recorded on June 24, nearly two months before Prigozhin's plane went down. At the time, Business Insider reported that the video showed "one of Russia's Il-22M aircraft" falling from the skies "after it was shot down during Wagner's armed uprising."
While this video did not show the plane on which Prigozhin was believed to have perished, another clip reportedly did.
After Gerashchenko's first miscaptioned post, he shared a similar video of a different plane falling from the sky:
Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU says that an eyewitness reported two explosions, resembling missile firing, sounded in the sky before Prigozhin's plane went down.
"There were two shooting blasts. When I heard the first explosion, I just raised my head and I saw sparks… pic.twitter.com/xBeQZIhktW
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 23, 2023
According to CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, and The Associated Press, this clip, which was shared by the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone, genuinely showed the plane crash of which Prigozhin was believed to be on board.
This story will be updated if more details become available.
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