A private jet registered to the tycoon Prigozhin that took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening, went down with the help of the Associated Press

Some Wagner fighters have relocated to Belarus, where officials have said the mercenaries are training Belarusian troops; others remain active in the Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere in Africa, where they have helped prop up authoritarian leaders loyal to Moscow.

Russian tycoon Prigozhin claimed this week that he was making Russia more than just a country, by making it even greater on all the continents, and Africa even more free.

He was let go from his post because of the transfer to another job. He is now on a short vacation,” the RIA report added, citing a report from the Russian news outlet RBC.

General Afzalov had previously served as the interim commander of Russia’s air force while General Surovikin led Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine. Suspicions that General Afzalov had replaced General Surovikin were raised in July, when the former was shown in official video footage delivering an air force report to General Valery V. Gerasimov, Russia’s top military officer.

U.S. officials believe that General Surovikin had advance knowledge of Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion. In the following hours, a video was released by the Russian authorities calling on the fighters to stand down.

He is also believed to have spearheaded the construction of Russia’s daunting network of defensive lines in the territory it occupies in Ukraine, which have challenged Kyiv’s counteroffensive.

According to Tass, a plane carrying three pilots and seven other people went down north of Moscow. It was not clear if Prigozhin was on the manifest.

Flight tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press showed a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.

The private jet that was shown in the pro-Wagner image was owned by the company. The color and placement of the number on the engine of the crashed plane matches prior photos of the Wagner jet examined by The AP.

Vladimir Putin congratulates Ukraine in the light of the tragedy of the Crash of the Extraordinary High-Energy Heavy Ion Collision

As the news of the crash broke, Russian President Putin spoke about the heroes of his country’s special military operation in Ukraine.