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The White House said Monday it was “increasingly confident” that Wagner chief Prigozhin died when his private plane crashed near Moscow last week.

“We are increasingly convinced that Prigojine died in the plane crash that occurred on August 23,” spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

She was referring to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former head of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company whose operations were critical to Russia’s war in Ukraine and which acted on behalf of the Kremlin in Syria and Africa.

Russia has previously said Prigozhin was among 10 people who died when the private Embraer executive jet crashed shortly after departing Moscow for St Petersburg. Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin and other Wagner staff also died.

The August 23 crash took place exactly two months after Prigozhin led an abortive mutiny against the Russian military that saw his forces overrun a key military installation in southern Russia before closing in on Moscow.

Prigozhin has long clashed with senior Russian military officials over what he sees as a lack of will in the supply of weapons as his Wagner forces attempted to take Ukrainian territory for the Kremlin.