The chief of Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is believed to have been killed in a plane crash, Russian state media reported Wednesday.
The aircraft, a business jet, crashed in the Tver region northwest of Moscow, with all 10 people onboard killed, according to Russia's state news agency TASS. Prigozhin was on its list of passengers. While Russian officials said that Prigozhin was on the passenger list, it was not immediately clear if he was in the aircraft.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday blamed "the West and its satellites" for unleashing war, repeating to allied nations his ongoing justification for Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking remotely to the BRICS summit currently underway in South Africa, Putin reiterated his claims that its conflict with Kyiv was in response to actions by the West, including the expansion of NATO.
Russia said Wednesday that it had thwarted an overnight Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow, in the sixth consecutive day of similar reported incidents on the capital.
Two educators were killed and three more people injured in a Russian attack on a school in the city of Romny in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine, the country's interior minister said Wednesday.