Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Wagner Group fighters to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state after the deadly plane crash believed to have killed the group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Reuters reported.
Putin signed a decree bringing in the change with immediate effect on Friday, after the Kremlin said that Western suggestions that Prigozhin had been killed on its orders were an "absolute lie".
Putin's introduction of a mandatory oath for employees of Wagner and other private military contractors was a clear move to bring such groups under tighter state control.
The decree, published on the Kremlin website, obliges anyone carrying out work on behalf of the military or supporting what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine to swear a formal oath of allegiance to Russia.
The Kremlin declined to definitively confirm his death, citing the need to wait for test results.
Russia's aviation authority has said that Prigozhin was on board a private jet which crashed on Wednesday evening northwest of Moscow with no survivors.
Putin sent his condolences to the families of those killed in the crash on Thursday and spoke of Prigozhin in the past tense.
He cited "preliminary information" as indicating that Prigozhin and his top Wagner associates had all been killed and, while praising Prigozhin, said he had also made some "serious mistakes."
The crash came exactly two months after Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against Russian army chiefs.
The attempted mutiny was ended by negotiations and an apparent Kremlin deal that saw him agree to relocate to neighboring Belarus, though he appeared to move freely inside Russia after the deal nonetheless.
On Wednesday, after the crash, US President Joe Biden said he was not surprised by the reports that Prigozhin had died.
Asked by reporters about the crash, Biden said he did not know for a fact what had happened.
"But I’m not surprised," Biden said, adding, "There is not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer."