Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of the private army of prison recruits and other mercenaries who have fought in some of the deadliest battles of the Russian invasion of UkraineHe escaped prosecution for his failed armed rebellion against the Kremlin and is in Belarus, the country’s president said Tuesday.
The exile of the 62-year-old Wagner Group owner was part of a deal that ended the short-lived mutiny in Russia. President Alexander Lukashenko said that Prigozhin and some of his troops may stay in Belarus “for some time” at his expense.
Prigozhin has not been seen since Saturday, when he greeted supporters from a vehicle in the southern city of Rostov. He issued a defiant audio statement on Monday. And on Tuesday morning, a private plane believed to belong to him flew from Rostov to an airbase southwest of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, according to FlightRadar24 data.
Meanwhile, preparations were underway for Wagner’s troops, numbering 25,000 according to Prigozhin, to hand over their heavy weapons to the Russian army, Moscow said. Prigozhin had said such moves were being made before the July 1 deadline for his fighters to sign contracts, which he opposed, to serve under military command.
Russian authorities also said on Tuesday they have closed a criminal investigation into the uprising and have not brought charges of armed rebellion against Prigozhin or his supporters.
Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to set the stage for charges of financial irregularities against an affiliate organization to which Prigozhin belongs. Putin told a military meeting that Prigozhin’s Concord Group earned 80 billion rubles ($941 million) from a contract to provide food to the military, and that Wagner had received more than 86 billion rubles (more than $1 billion) in the past year for wages and additional items. .
“I hope that by doing so they didn’t steal anything, or they didn’t steal so much,” Putin said, adding that authorities will closely examine the Concord contract.
For years, Prigozhin has enjoyed lucrative catering contracts with the Russian government. Police who searched his St. Petersburg office on Saturday said he found 4 billion rubles ($48 million) in trucks outside, according to news reports confirmed by Wagner’s boss. He said the money was meant to pay the families of the soldiers.
Prigozhin and his fighters halted the revolt on Saturday, less than 24 hours after it began and shortly after Putin spoke on national television, calling the unnamed leaders of the rebellion traitors.
The charge of staging an armed riot could have been punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prigozhin’s evasion of prosecution is in stark contrast to Moscow’s treatment of his critics, including those organizing anti-government protests in Russia, where many opposition figures have been punished with long sentences in notoriously harsh penal colonies.
Lukashenko said some of Wagner’s fighters are now in the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine that Russia illegally annexed last September.
The shocking series of events in recent days constitutes the most serious threat yet to Putin’s hold on power amid the 16-month war in Ukraine, and on Tuesday he again acknowledged the threat by saying the result could have been a civil war.
In speeches this week, Putin has sought to project stability and demonstrate authority.
In a ceremony in the Kremlin on Tuesday, the president descended the red-carpeted stairs of the 15th-century white-stone Palace of Facets to address soldiers and law enforcement officers, thanking them for their actions in preventing rebellion.
In another display of business as usual, Russian media showed Defense Secretary Shoigu, in his military uniform, greeting Cuba’s defense minister in a ceremony laden with pomp. Prigozhin has said his goal had been to oust Shoigu and other top military commanders, not to stage a coup against Putin.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 29 years while reliant on Russian subsidies and support, described the uprising as the latest development in the Prigozhin-Shoigu standoff. As the riot unfolded, he said, he put the Belarusian armed forces on a fighting footing and urged Putin not to rush his response, lest the conflict get out of control.
He told Prigozhin he would be “squashed like a bug” if he tried to attack Moscow and warned that the Kremlin would never accede to his demands, Lukashenko said.
Like Putin, the Belarusian leader described the war in Ukraine as an existential threat, saying: “If Russia collapses, we will all perish under the rubble.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not reveal details about the Kremlin’s deal with Prigozhin, saying only that Putin had provided “certain guarantees” aimed at avoiding the “worst-case scenario.”
Asked why the rebels were allowed to get within 200 kilometers (about 125 miles) of Moscow without facing serious resistance, National Guard chief Viktor Zolotov told reporters: “We concentrated our forces in a fist closer to Moscow. If we spread them out thin, they would have plunged like a knife through butter.”
Zolotov, a former Putin bodyguard, also said the National Guard lacks main battle tanks and other heavy weapons and would now get them.
The mercenaries shot down at least six Russian helicopters and a military communications plane as they advanced on Moscow, killing at least a dozen airmen, according to Russian media reports. The Defense Ministry did not release information about the casualties, but Putin mentioned them on Tuesday and honored them with a moment of silence.
“The pilots, our fellow fighters, died while fighting the mutiny,” he said. “They did not waver and carried out the orders and their military duty with dignity.”
Some Russian war bloggers and patriotic activists have expressed outrage that Prigozhin and his troops will not be punished for killing the airmen.
Prigozhin lamented the deaths in his statement on Monday, but said Wagner’s troops fired because the planes were bombing them.
In his televised address Monday night, Putin said the rebellion’s organizers had played into the hands of the Ukrainian government and its allies. However, he praised the rank and file rioters who “did not engage in fratricidal bloodshed and stopped on the brink.”
A Washington-based think tank said it was “probably in an effort to retain” Wagner’s fighters in Ukraine, where Moscow needs “trained and effective manpower” as it faces a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The Institute for the Study of War also said the rift between Putin and Prigozhin was likely to be irreparable, and that providing the Wagner boss and his Belarus loyalists as an apparent safe haven could be a trap.
Putin has offered Prigozhin’s fighters the choice of placing themselves under Russian military command, leaving the service, or going to Belarus.
Lukashenko said there is no reason to fear Wagner’s presence in his country, although in Russia, convicts recruited by Wagner have been suspected of violent crimes. Wagner’s troops have “invaluable” military knowledge and experience to share with Belarus, he said.
But Belarusian opposition leader in exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who challenged Lukashenko in a 2020 election that was seen as rigged and sparked mass protests, said Wagner’s troops will threaten the country and its neighbors.
“Belarusians do not welcome the war criminal Prigozhin,” he told The Associated Press. “If Wagner establishes military bases on our territory, he will represent a new threat to our sovereignty and our neighbors.”
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Associated Press journalist Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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