President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia remained silent on Thursday on the crash of a private plane that included the mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin on the passenger manifest, giving an address that made no mention of the aircraft.

A day after the jet crashed in a field between Moscow and St Petersburg, the Russian leader and top Kremlin officials have made no mention of the fate of Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner private military group who staged a brief mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June, in one of the most dramatic challenges to Putin’s rule in decades.

Russian state news media have instead heaped attention on the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, where Putin gave a brief speech via video link welcoming new members of the group of emerging economies but offered no comment on the events in Russia.

A passenger manifest released by the Russian civil aviation authorities on Wednesday showed Prigozhin’s name and that of Wagner’s top commander, Dmitri Utkin, among the seven passengers and three crew members. And Grey Zone, a Telegram account associated with the Wagner group, said that Prigozhin had been killed. But there was no official confirmation of his death from Wagner or the Russian authorities.

Russia’s aviation authority offered no comment on the reason for the crash. Russia’s Emergency Services said the remains of all 10 people on board the plane had been recovered. One western official said that Prigozhin was on board the plane that crashed, citing “many indicators” that his government had evaluated. US officials said they could not confirm that Prigozhin had been killed, or why the jet went down.

A person who answered the phone at a morgue in the Russian region of Tver, where emergency workers reportedly took remains recovered from the crash site, refused to answer questions or provide any information about when the victims would be identified.

New York Times News Service