A newly released video appears to show Yevgeny Prigozhin downplaying the threat to his life just days before he was killed in a plane crash.
Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, was buried quietly this week after officials said DNA evidence confirmed his was among the bodies found north of Moscow. The Kremlin has denied having had anything to do with the crash, which occurred two months after Prigozhin led an armed mutiny that challenged President Vladimir Putin’s authority.
A video posted to Telegram early Thursday by a group called Orchestra, which often posts material supportive of the Wagner Group, purportedly shows Prigozhin in the back of a vehicle somewhere in Africa.
"For those discussing whether I am alive or not, how am I doing ... it is the weekend now, the second half of August of the year 2023. I'm in Africa. Therefore, to all lovers of discussing my liquidation, intimate life, earnings, anything else — everything is fine," he said in the video.
NBC News cannot verify the video or where and when it was recorded.
Prigozhin's reference to the weekend means it may have been recorded on Aug. 19 or 20. Another video, which the Orchestra Telegram account shared Aug. 22, purportedly shows Prigozhin wearing the same military fatigues in a desert-like area.
The stricken private Embraer jet was also carrying two other senior Wagner figures when it crashed Aug. 23 traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg — exactly two months after Prigozhin’s fighters staged a brief mutiny.
Prigozhin visited African countries where Wagner has operations in the days before his apparent death, meeting with government officials and looking for new opportunities, a former U.S. envoy to the region told NBC News.
Putin said in his first comments after the crash, "As far as I know, he just returned from Africa yesterday."
Putin did not attend the small private funeral that was held for his former ally in his native St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
The Kremlin said Wednesday that it was investigating whether the plane was downed on purpose.
“It is obvious that different versions are being considered, including the version — you know what we are talking about — let’s say, a deliberate atrocity,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a daily briefing call.
Peskov had labeled as an "absolute lie" the suggestion that Putin may have had Prigozhin killed in revenge for the armed mutiny, which posed the gravest challenge to him in his decades in power.
Western analysts and public officials, including President Joe Biden, had predicted Prigozhin would not long survive such a public threat to the Kremlin's authority.
Prigozhin had built the Wagner Group into a powerful private military force on the back of his Kremlin connections. It had been heavily active in Russia’s war in Ukraine, having provided thousands of troops fighting on the eastern front lines before the mutiny ended in their exile in Belarus.
The group also helped expand Russia's influence in Africa by providing security to several leaders while amassing lucrative contracts.
A report by the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee last month said Wagner posed a serious security threat to Western countries and called for it to be proscribed as a terrorist group.
