Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future.

Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent.

The Kremlin said that Western suggestions Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had been killed on its orders were an "absolute lie" while declining to definitively confirm his death, citing the need to wait for test results.

Russia's aviation authority has said that Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, was on board a private jet which crashed on Wednesday evening northwest of Moscow with no survivors.

Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated while flying in his private jet from Moscow to St. Petersburg — but it doesn’t appear that the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, according to US officials.

Preliminary information gathered by the US government, which was still being reviewed, suggested that either a bomb went off aboard the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet mid-flight, or the aircraft was the target of another form of sabotage, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Conspiracy theories are swirling around the possible death of notorious Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin after a plane crashed over Russian territory on Wednesday.

Russia's civil aviation authority said that a private jet listing former Kremlin ally Prigozhin as a passenger had crashed north of Moscow, killing all 10 people on board the aircraft. The passengers included Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian officer with the call sign, "Wagner," who is thought to have co-founded the mercenary outfit.

Only two months ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russia’s private Wagner Group militia, turned his army away from Ukraine’s battlefields and trained them on Russian targets. The Wagner Group executed a stunning advance into Russian territory, sacked the city of Rostov, and advanced north toward Moscow with the stated goal of forcing Vladimir Putin, at gunpoint, to execute some personnel changes in the Ministry of Defense.

In 2019, Yevgeny Prigozhin was briefly reported to have died after an An-72 transport plane crashed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The embassy said two Russians had been onboard the plane, which was also carrying members of the DRC’s presidential staff.

The Wagner chief reappeared three days later, however, reports of his death having been greatly exaggerated.

Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s doomed private plane showed no signs of distress until a sudden drop 30 seconds before the deadly crash in Russia — amid speculation that the rogue warlord’s plane may have been downed by a bomb hidden in a crate of wine.

The Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet, with Prigozhin and other senior Wagner Group members listed among the 10 passengers, made a “sudden downward vertical” at 5:19 p.m. local time Wednesday, according to Ian Petchenik of the flight-tracking site Flightradar24.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said Kyiv had nothing to do with the presumed death of the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Zelenskiy telling journalists on Thursday: “We had nothing to do with it. Everybody realises who has something to do with it.”

Russian state media reported on Wednesday that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group who led an aborted mutiny earlier this year, was listed as a passenger on a jet that crashed north of Moscow.

NBC News was not able to confirm the news.

Prigozhin was among the seven passengers aboard an Embraer business jet that went down in the Tver region, the Federal Air Transport Agency told the Tass state news agency.