Russia-Ukraine updates: Flight recorders, bodies recovered from crash site

US President Joe Biden says American officials are trying to determine how Prigozhin’s plane crashed in Russia, leaving no survivors.

Russia earlier on Friday scolded Biden for expressing his lack of surprise that Prigozhin had been killed in a plane crash and cautioned that it was not appropriate for Washington to make such remarks.

Asked by reporters what brought the Wagner Group leader’s plane down, Biden said: “I’m not at liberty to speak to that precisely. … We’re trying to nail down precisely, but I don’t have anything to say.”

Strong backing for Ukraine’s effort to repel Russia’s invasion has been the rare issue where President Joe Biden has mustered bipartisan support. But this week’s first GOP presidential debate — and recent comments by former President Donald Trump on Ukraine — suggest that the dynamic will face a stress test as the 2024 presidential campaign heats up.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at Wednesday’s debate he would make additional US aid “contingent” on European allies increasing contributions. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said Ukraine funding would be better spent on the “invasion of our own southern border.” Meanwhile, Trump has said, without saying how, that he will settle the war in one day if he returns to the White House.

German prosecutors have said they are investigating the attempted murder of Berlin-based Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko after she was one of three Russian exile journalists who experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning.

Kostyuchenko, a foreign correspondent who exposed alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, last October experienced extreme disorientation, abdominal pain and swollen extremities on a train journey from Munich to Berlin.

“We can confirm that an investigation into the attempted murder of Elena Kostyuchenko is pending,” a spokesperson for Berlin prosecutors said on Friday.

Investigative portal The Insider reported that two other Russian woman journalists living in exile experienced poisoning symptoms in the same period: In May 2023, Natalia Arno, president of the US-based Free Russia Foundation fell ill in Prague. In October, radio journalist Irina Babloyan fell ill in Tbilisi.

The Russian rouble has weakened past 95 against the dollar, with traders keeping an eye on developments after Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s presumed death in a plane crash.

On Friday, the rouble was 0.6 percent weaker against the dollar at 95.44 and had lost 0.7 percent to trade at 103.32 versus the euro. It shed 0.9 percent against the yuan to 13.08.

Russia is regrouping in the Moscow-controlled eastern part of Ukraine in order to resume an offensive, Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of the Ukrainian military’s ground forces, has said.

“After a month of fierce fighting and significant losses in the Kupiansk and Lyman directions, the enemy is regrouping its forces and means, simultaneously throwing newly formed brigades and divisions from the territory of the Russian Federation,” Syrskyi has said in his Telegram channel.

Syrskyi said that the main goal of these measures was to “increase the level of combat potential and resume active offensive operations”.

Syrskyi did not provide details of the Russian regrouping but said the forces continued heavy artillery and mortar shelling and air assaults.

“Under such conditions, we must promptly take all measures to strengthen our defences on the threatened lines and advance where possible,” the general said.

Kupiansk, a town with a pre-war population of approximately 27,000, was seized by Russia in the early days of the February 2022 invasion before Ukrainian troops recaptured it in a lightning offensive last September that embarrassed Moscow.

Regional authorities announced a mandatory evacuation of civilians from near the Kupiansk front earlier this month due to daily Russian shelling.

The United States sees viable routes to export Ukrainian grain through the country’s territorial waters and overland after Russia withdrew from the grain deal, a senior US official has said, adding that they aim to return to exporting at pre-war averages from Ukraine over the next months.

“I think we see there are viable routes through Ukraine’s territorial waters and overland, and we are aiming … over the next couple of months to return to exporting at kind of pre-war averages from Ukraine,” James O’Brien, head of the Department of State’s Office of Sanctions Coordination, told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

Following his comments, the Turkish and Ukrainian foreign ministers said that other solutions to the export of Ukrainian grain than the Black Sea grain deal were less optimal.

A second plane linked to the Wagner Group chief by some Russian media has no connection to the mercenary force and never has, the CEO of the aircraft operator tells Reuters.

Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency has said Prigozhin was on board a private Embraer jet that crashed on Wednesday northwest of Moscow, killing all on board.

Russian media mainly associated with the Wagner Group’s Telegram channel Grey Zone had linked a second business jet with the tail number RA-02748 with the mercenary group and had reported that it was also in the air at the time of the crash.

But the jet operator, Jetica LLC, denied any such link.

“Neither the plane itself nor its passengers are related to Wagner and never have been,” Jetica CEO Sergey Trifonov told Reuters.

This plane had not been rented out, Trifonov said, although he declined to say who its owner was.

Turkey sees “no alternative” to the original grain agreement Ukraine struck with Russia, its foreign minister says, dismissing an alternate route reportedly being considered by the United States.

“We know alternative routes are being sought [for grain shipments], but we see no alternative to the original initiative because they carry risks,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told reporters during a visit to Kyiv.

Russian investigators have said they recovered flight recorders and 10 bodies from the scene of a plane crash thought to have killed Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin two days ago.

An investigation is under way into what caused Wednesday’s crash, which came exactly two months after Wagner’s short-lived rebellion against Moscow’s military leadership.

“In the course of initial investigative work, the bodies of 10 victims were found at the site of the plane crash,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said on social media on Friday.

“Molecular genetic analyses are being carried out to establish their identities,” it said, adding that “flight recorders” were also recovered from the scene.

Estonia’s opposition and mainstream media have demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas after it emerged that a company partly owned by her husband was continuing to operate in Russia.

Public broadcaster ERR reported that the transport company Stark Logistics, which is partly owned by Kallas’s husband Arvo Hallik, had continued deliveries to Russia after the start of the war with Ukraine.

The United States and the European Union have levied unprecedented sanctions against Moscow to limit Russia’s ability to finance its war effort since the invasion in February last year.

In a statement on Facebook on Wednesday, Kallas said that her husband’s company was assisting one of its Estonian clients “in accordance with the laws and sanctions imposed”.

She said that all trade with Russia must “stop as long as the war of Russian aggression against Ukraine continues”.

Kallas has been prime minister since 2021.

Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko has said that Wagner members would remain in his country, after the presumed death of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin renewed uncertainty around the group’s fate.

“Wagner lived, is alive, and will live in Belarus,” Lukashenko was cited as saying by state-run news agency Belta, without specifying who would lead the personnel.

With Prigozhin’s apparent demise, the fate of his private army Wagner remains unclear.

“I can’t tell you anything right now. I don’t know,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, referring to what comes next for the mercenary outfit.

After the June mutiny, Moscow was careful to run a campaign against the outspoken Wagner chief – but not against his fighters, who spearheaded Russia’s advance in key battles in Ukraine and were seen as heroes back home.

“As the president has said many times, the Wagner group made a great contribution to the special military operation,” Peskov said, using Kremlin-approved terminology to describe the conflict.

“The heroism of these people will not be forgotten. That is what the president said.”

The Kremlin has announced by decree that Russian paramilitary fighters will have to swear an oath to the Russian flag.

The measure announced on Friday is a part of an attempt to rein in groups like Wagner in wake of the mutiny carried out by the mercenary group last June.

Russia’s paramilitary group Wagner is a spent force, Ukraine’s defence minister has said, after the presumed death of the mercenary outfit’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“There is actually no longer a Wagner group left as they were a year ago, as a serious fighting force,” Oleksii Reznikov told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag in extracts of the interview released in advance of publication on Sunday.

“They are broken.”

The minister also believed that Prigozhin’s presumed demise had weakened Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Because it has shown the world: if Putin does a deal with someone and breaks the deal, then that means that he cannot be trusted,” said Reznikov.

There has been widespread speculation in the West that the Kremlin may have been involved in the death of Prigozhin since Wednesday, when a private jet reportedly carrying the Wagner chief crashed between Moscow and St Petersburg.

A senior US official said there are viable routes to export Ukrainian grain through the country’s territorial waters and overland after Russia withdrew from the grain deal.

“I think we see there are viable routes through Ukraine’s territorial waters and overland, and we are aiming … over the next couple of months to return to exporting at kind of prewar averages from Ukraine,” James O’Brien, head of the Department of State’s Office of Sanctions Coordination, told the Reuters news agency in an interview.

Russia has blockaded Ukrainian ports since it invaded in February 2022, and has since threatened to treat all vessels as potential military targets after pulling out of a safe passage deal in July.

Ekaterina Kotrikadze, from the independent Russian TV Rain, said Putin’s condolences for the presumed death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, was for the elites around him.

“He wanted to show people around him that the situation is established, that they need to understand that this kind of thing may happen, but they need to calm down”, she told Al Jazeera.

Kotrikadze added that the crash was a message to those who might disagree with Putin.

“The whole operation with killing Yevgeny Prigozhin is such an open statement that he, Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation has actually decided to kill a problem … Putin could not pardon him, it was a traitorous action in Putin’s eyes,” she said.

Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, said that the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive was “obvious”, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

Naryshkin said at a roundtable dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Battle of Kursk, “Today, after the obvious failure of the summer campaign of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the so-called counteroffensive, the Kyiv followers of Nazi ideas and their overseas curators echo the German generals, blaming their mistakes either on unsuitable weather or too dense shrub vegetation on the battlefield.”

Click here for a roundup of the key events from day 548 of the war.

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Russian air defences have thwarted a Ukrainian missile attack in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, and several drones have been destroyed off Crimea, Russian authorities say.

The Ministry of Defence said in a statement that a missile from Kyiv “was detected and destroyed by air defence systems over the territory of the Kaluga region”.

Kaluga borders the Moscow region, which, according to Russian authorities. has recently been targeted almost daily by drone attacks.

Airspace above Moscow’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports was closed, the Russian TASS news agency reported, citing aviation services and without specifying why.

“Several UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were destroyed over the sea in the area of Cape Khersones” in Crimea, Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, wrote on Telegram.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has doubts that Putin was behind a plane crash on Wednesday that reportedly killed Prigozhin.

“He is a calculating, very calm and even a slow person in making decisions on other, less complicated issues, so I can’t imagine that Putin did it, that Putin is to blame. It’s too rough, unprofessional work, if anything,” Lukashenko said in comments carried by the state-run news agency Belta.

Zelenskyy has met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in Kyiv and discussed the Black Sea grain deal that Russia quit last month.

Turkey and the UN brokered the agreement, which allowed Ukraine to export farm products by sea after the war broke out.

Zelenskyy wrote on X, formally known as Twitter: “I received Foreign Minister of Turkey Hakan Fidan to discuss a range of important issues. Preparations for the Global Peace Summit and the Peace Formula. Russia’s threats to the Black Sea grain corridor. I thank Turkey for its consistent and lasting support for Ukraine.”

Social media channels linked to Russia’s Wagner Group say a top fighter had been detained in Finland at Ukraine’s request.

The man was identified as Yan Petrovsky, who has fought in Ukraine since 2014 as part of Rusich, or the Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance Group, a Wagner subunit. He was arrested a month ago and could now be extradited to Ukraine, according to an affiliated Telegram channel.

A district court in Vantaa near Helsinki is expected to extend Petrovsky’s detention at the request of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, a court official said.

The bureau sought the detention of Petrovsky, who also uses the name Voislav Torden, on suspicion of participating and supporting ‘terrorism’, the official said.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said the Navy struck a Ukrainian port infrastructure facility that is used for the army, the Russian state-owned TASS news agency reported.

“Tonight, the Russian Navy delivered a sea-based high-precision long-range weapon against a port infrastructure facility,” spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said.

Konashenkov added that “the object was hit.”

The Kremlin says Putin has no plans to attend the G20 summit in India in September in person.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin accusing him of war crimes in Ukraine, a charge the Kremlin strongly denies.

But, India is not an ICC member country.

This week Putin attended a gathering of leaders from the BRICS group of emerging economies in South Africa by video link.

Russian investigators have confirmed the death of the pilot in a plane crash which reportedly killed everyone on board, including mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Six other people were on the passenger list, along with a crew of three, including pilot Alexei Levshin.

According to the Reuters news agency, a source with knowledge of the matter said a DNA test will be conducted later on Friday to confirm a genetic match with Levshin’s family.

An anonymous source close to the situation also said investigators told Levshin’s family that they had “documentary proof” he had been on the crashed plane.

The fate of the other passengers was not shared.

Al Jazeera could not independently verify the findings.