African leaders allied with Russia had grown used to dealing with Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the swaggering, profane mercenary leader who traveled the continent by private jet, offering to prop up shaky regimes with guns and propaganda in return for gold and diamonds.

The U.K. will officially declare the Wagner Group as a terrorist organization, according to a on Sept. 6 statement from the British Home Office.

The Russian private military company will join al-Qaeda and ISIS on the list of proscribed terrorist organizations in the U.K.

After the order comes into effect on Sept. 13, it will be a criminal offense to be a member of Wagner, use its logo, or encourage support for the group.

The Russian people are skeptical over the circumstances of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, according to Western-based survey groups that are probing Russian public opinion and gauging the strength of the Kremlin to shape the public narrative.  

Prigozhin’s violent death in a plane crash was hardly a surprise given his short-lived armed rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Critics and enemies of Putin in Russia have a tendency to end up dead or in prison.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin alluded to threats to his safety in a video which appears to have been filmed days before he died in a plane crash.

"For those who are discussing whether I am alive or not... everything's OK," he says in the short clip on Telegram.

The Russian mercenary leader was buried at a funeral in St Petersburg on Tuesday, according to his press team.

Prigozhin and nine others were killed in the crash near Moscow on 23 August, which led to frenzied speculation.

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was buried in a private funeral on Tuesday, his press service said, nearly a week after he and nine others died in a plane crash in Russia.

Prigozhin, 62, was buried at the Prokhorov Cemetery of St. Petersburg in a closed funeral, his press service said on Telegram.

About 20 to 30 people attended the 40-minute "VIP" funeral, according to a cemetery employee. The attendees were all dressed in civilian clothes, with no military uniforms seen, and included relatives and close associates of Prigozhin, the employee said.

Vladimir Putin will not be attending the funeral of his longtime friend-turned-foe Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin said Tuesday. Noting that Russian leadership does not have “any specific information” about the mercenary chief’s funeral, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested that the Russian president had been left off the invite list. “The decision on this matter is made by relatives and friends. We can’t say anything without them,” Peskov told local media.

Very few were taken aback by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s presumed death, even if the means — plunging from the sky in a plane crash — were undeniably dramatic. Such an eventuality had been widely discussed in both Russian and Western circles ever since the mercenary leader’s short-lived mutiny in June. No matter that Mr. Prigozhin subsequently met with the Kremlin and seemed to come and go where he pleased. To many, it was only a matter of time until he got his comeuppance.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ferocious shadow army changed the course of Russian history. Few narratives have been as enigmatic as the story of how a convicted criminal turned catering magnate built the Wagner group into a brand to be reckoned with across the globe. But the plane crash that killed Prigozhin and nine others this week is proof positive that the more undeniable the Wagner group’s unhinged brutality became, the more president Vladimir Putin viewed Prigozhin as a liability.

As Vladimir Putin sits thinking in his bomb-proof office, he may come to regret the fact that the entire world is sure that he ordered the death of the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Kremlin is a Camorra, a mafia style parliament, running a gangster operation to fill Putin’s pockets and those of his oligarchs and elites. But as the Japanese found in Burma in 1944, if you prosecute a war with terror you will likely come unstuck against a well led, motivated and moral organisation like General ‘Bill’ Slim’s ‘Forgotten Army’.