SerpApi.Org
An airport executive believed to have insider knowledge about the assassination of Vladimir Putin’s friend-turned-foe Yevgeny Prigozhin has been found dead.
Alexey Korshenko, who headed the business aviation terminal at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport that fielded Prigozhin’s final flight, oversaw the terminal where the notorious mercenary boss took off before his fiery 2023 crash, which came two months after he staged an armed uprising against the Russian leader.
Korshenko, 57, was found hanged on the balcony of his home in Moscow on June 6, but his identity was only revealed this week, The Moscow Times reports.
Russian investigators are treating his death as a suspected suicide, though his colleagues have pushed back and noted that he was abruptly fired from his post around three weeks before his death, according to the newspaper. Friends of Korshenko are also said to have disputed the official narrative, pointing out that he knew sensitive information about what happened with Prigozhin’s plane on the day of the mercenary boss’s death.
Among the things that happened that day was the replacement of a part that was said to be malfunctioning on the Brazilian-made Embraer jet. Korshenko is believed to have had information related to those maintenance issues prior to takeoff, when a company with deep ties to Russian organized crime arrived to supply a replacement part.
Prigozhin, the Wagner Group founder whose short-lived mutiny against the Russian president marked the most serious challenge to his power ever, died in a fiery plane crash north of Moscow in August 2023. Coming just a few weeks after Putin condemned Prigozhin’s “treason” and described the uprising as a “stab in the back,” the fatal plane crash is widely believed to have been arranged by the Kremlin.
The Wagner Group founder took off from the same business terminal that Korshenko helped establish in 2011, and the former executive oversaw the operations that handled Prigozhin’s flight.
After the jet crashed in Russia’s Tver region, killing everyone on board, investigators were denied access to the terminal’s security footage, and Federal Security Service officials immediately seized the plane’s inspection report, The Moscow Times said.
Official Russian reports have attributed Prigozhin’s crash to a hand grenade detonation mid-flight, though Western intelligence sources theorize that the incident was directed by Nikolai Patrushev, formerly the secretary of the Russian Security Council.
