Russian investigators said Sunday that genetic tests had confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner mercenary group, was among the 10 people killed in a plane crash last Wednesday.

Russia's aviation agency had previously published the names of all 10 people on board the private jet which crashed in the Tver region northwest of Moscow. They included Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, his right-hand man who helped found the Wagner group.

"As part of the investigation of the plane crash in the Tver region, molecular-genetic examinations have been completed," Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement on its site on the Telegram messaging app.

"According to their results, the identities of all 10 dead were established. They correspond to the list stated in the flight sheet," it said.

The private jet crashed two months to the day after Prigozhin led an abortive mutiny against Russia's army top brass.

President Vladimir Putin described that mutiny as a treacherous "stab in the back", but later met with Prigozhin in the Kremlin.

He sent his condolences on Thursday to the families of those the aviation agency said had died in the crash.

The 62-year-old's extraordinary journey took him from prisoner and hot dog vendor to elegant St. Petersburg restaurateur, and then from propaganda wars to the grisly battlefields in Ukraine.

As an instrument to project Russian power globally, his soldiers-for-hire were deployed to Africa to provide security for warlords and fought in Syria to shore up the Bashar Assad regime.

In May, they seized the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in a rare victory for Russia in the war, but Prigozhin complained bitterly about the Defense Ministry's conduct of the fight, saying it had denied ammunition to his forces.

As the war slogged on, Prigozhin dropped his public reticence and began releasing social media videos in which he lauded his troops and increasingly denounced Russia's defense establishment for alleged mismanagement of the war and denying weapons and ammunition to his forces.

He abruptly escalated his scathing criticism in June by calling for an armed uprising to oust Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

On June 23, his forces left Ukraine and seized the military headquarters in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. He ordered them to roll toward Moscow, saying it was "not a military coup, but a march of justice" to unseat Shoigu.

He called off the action less than 24 hours later in a deal struck by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.

In a televised address, Putin had vowed to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protege. He called the rebellion a "betrayal" and "treason."

But under the deal allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later said Putin's "highest goal" in the deal with the Wagner chief was "to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results."

Prigozhin lived most of his life in the shadows. The owner of a high-end restaurant, he won Kremlin catering ventures that earned him the nickname of "Putin's chef," but he was mostly known only in the rarefied circles of the elite.

As the head of the Internet Research Agency, a "troll farm" that focused on interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he was barely visible.

But he barged into world view when mercenaries from his Wagner Group entered the war in Ukraine in 2022, becoming infamous both for their bloodthirsty fighting and their miserable treatment as cannon fodder in the eastern city of Bakhmut.

As part of the deal to defuse the crisis, an investigation into his mutiny was dropped, and he agreed to move to Belarus. He later appeared in videos, saying his soldiers would be deployed to Africa.

A recruitment video released earlier this week showed him at an undisclosed desert site in military fatigues and holding an assault rifle as he said his company was seeking "real warriors" and "continuing to fulfill the tasks" it had promised to carry out.

Prigozhin and Putin had long ties. Both were born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.