Moscow Airport Boss Who Serviced Prigozhin Jet Found Hanged

The man who helped run the private jet terminal that prepped Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane before it fell out of the sky is now dead himself. Alexey Korshenko, 57, was found hanged on the balcony of his Moscow apartment on June 6. Russian investigators are calling it a suspected suicide.

The timing is what has people talking. Korshenko had reportedly been fired from his job about three weeks before his body was found, and no one has said why. His colleagues described the dismissal as sudden and out of nowhere. For a guy who spent decades building his career in the same industry, getting pushed out that fast raised eyebrows before he ever ended up on that balcony.

Russian authorities have not tied his death to the 2023 crash at all. But the news broke wide open in late July, and once people connected the dots between his old job and Prigozhin's last flight, the story picked up steam fast.

Who Alexey Korshenko Actually Was

This was not some low-level baggage handler. Korshenko had been in aviation since at least 1997, when he started at Aeroflot. In 2008 he moved to a company called Avia Group, which manages the business aviation terminals at both Sheremetyevo in Moscow and Pulkovo in St. Petersburg. These are the terminals where the ultra-rich and the politically connected fly in and out of Russia without waiting in line with the rest of us.

By 2011 he had become CEO of a subsidiary called AG Terminal, which ran Terminal A at Sheremetyevo, the VIP building he helped create. That company got hit with U.S. sanctions in 2015 because of its ties to Gennady Timchenko, a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin. It was eventually shut down in 2020, and Korshenko moved back into Avia Group as a deputy general director handling ground and terminal services.

Here is the part that makes the whole thing feel a little too close to the top. Avia Group does not just run VIP terminals. It also owns a helipad on Valaam Island, a spot Putin himself visits on the regular. The company reported a net profit of 506 million rubles for 2025, according to Russian business records. So this was a man plugged into a company that operates in the same physical space as the Kremlin's inner circle.

The Terminal Handled Prigozhin's Last Flight

Let's back up to why any American has heard the name Prigozhin. He was the founder of the Wagner Group, the private army Russia used to do its dirtiest work in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa. In June 2023 he did something almost nobody in Russia dares to do. He launched an armed mutiny, marched his fighters toward Moscow, and openly challenged the country's military leadership. Then he backed down and cut a deal.

Two months later, on August 23, 2023, his Embraer Legacy 600 business jet crashed in the Tver region shortly after takeoff. All 10 people on board died, including Prigozhin. Almost nobody who follows Russia believed it was an accident. When you humiliate the Kremlin and then die in a fireball eight weeks later, people notice.

That jet passed through the exact terminal Korshenko helped build and oversaw. The plane was serviced there before it took off on its final flight. That single fact is the entire reason his death is making headlines around the world instead of being a quiet local police report.

What He Might Have Known

Open source reporting suggests Korshenko may have had inside knowledge about how the plane was prepped that morning. According to intelligence-based accounts, technicians ran pre-flight checks and found two mechanical problems. One of them involved a turbo-cooler unit that needed to be swapped out.

Here is where it gets strange. A replacement part imported from the United States turned out to be defective. So a Russian firm stepped in and supplied a different unit instead. Unverified reports claim that Russian-supplied component may have concealed an explosive device. That claim has not been independently confirmed by anyone, so treat it as an allegation, not a fact. But it is the theory that keeps circulating.

On top of that, another aviation company reportedly showed up the morning of the departure and inspected the jet under the excuse that they were thinking about buying it. Whether that was real interest or cover for something else, nobody can say for sure. But when you stack a mystery buyer inspecting the plane, a last-minute swapped part, and a terminal boss who knew the whole routine, you can see why analysts keep circling back to him.

The Paperwork That Disappeared

After the crash, Russia's own transport security officials went to the Sheremetyevo business terminal to investigate. You would think they'd get full cooperation. They did not. According to reporting, they were denied access to the security camera footage, the monitoring data, and the maintenance documentation.

The one document they could get their hands on was the aircraft inspection report. And then FSB officers, Russia's security service, reportedly seized that too. So the people supposedly tasked with figuring out what happened were locked out of nearly every record that mattered. That detail alone tells you how tightly the whole thing was controlled from the top down. The lack of access has frustrated independent experts ever since.

The Official Story vs. What Intelligence Sources Say

Russia's Investigative Committee reached its own conclusion about the crash. Their story is that hand grenades detonated inside the cabin. That's it. No missile, no external bomb, no foul play from the outside. Just grenades going off mid-air, somehow, on the plane carrying the man who had just embarrassed Putin.

Western governments and independent analysts have flatly rejected that version. And intelligence sources, both Russian and Western, previously told The Wall Street Journal that the plane was deliberately destroyed. Those same sources pointed to former Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev as the man who directed the assassination. Patrushev is one of the most powerful hardliners in Putin's orbit, so that is not a name people throw around lightly.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Prigozhin's death over and over. That denial has not convinced many people outside Russia, but officially, that is where things stand.

A Pattern That's Hard to Ignore

Korshenko's death does not stand alone, and that's the part that makes it feel bigger than one man on a balcony. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, more than two dozen top executives at major Russian companies have died under suspicious or unexplained circumstances.

We're talking about people from Gazprom, Novatek, Lukoil, and the tech company VK. Falls from windows, sudden illnesses, deaths at home. Some were ruled suicides. Some were never really explained at all. When the list gets that long, calling each one a coincidence starts to feel like a stretch. A former terminal director connected to a company that manages Russian airports fits that grim pattern a little too neatly.

What Happens Now

Russian police have opened a preliminary inquiry into how Korshenko died. That is standard procedure and does not mean they suspect anything beyond suicide. His body was found on Flotskaya Street, and the story was first reported by the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets back in June, before the wider international press caught on last week.

Journalists tried to reach Korshenko's relatives. Nobody answered calls or messages. That silence is its own kind of answer in a country where talking to reporters about a case like this carries real weight.

So where does that leave us? A man who knew exactly how Prigozhin's jet was handled on its final morning gets fired for no stated reason, then turns up dead three weeks later, and the investigators who might have learned something from that terminal were locked out of the footage and the paperwork years ago. Officially, none of it is connected. Officially, it was a suspected suicide. But the questions about what really happened over the Tver region in August 2023 are not going anywhere, and Korshenko was one of the few people who might have been able to answer them.

Whether the truth ever comes out is a different matter. In Russia, stories like this one tend to end exactly where they started, with a lot of coincidences nobody is allowed to look at too closely.