Prigozhin has moved to Belarus, and Russia won’t press charges for mutiny
Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of the private army of prison recruits and other mercenaries who have fought some of the deadliest battles in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, escaped prosecution for his abortive armed rebellion against the Kremlin and arrived Tuesday in Belarus.
The exile of the 62-year-old owner of the Wagner Group was part of a deal that ended the short-lived mutiny in Russia. President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed Prigozhin was in Belarus, and said he and some of his troops were welcome to stay “for some time” at their own expense.
Prigozhin has not been seen since Saturday, when he waved to well-wishers from a vehicle in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. He issued a defiant audio statement Monday. And on Tuesday morning, a private jet believed to belong to him flew from Rostov to an air base southwest of the Belarusian capital, Minsk, according to data from FlightRadar24.
Meanwhile, Moscow said preparations were underway for Wagner’s troops fighting in Ukraine, who numbered 25,000 according to Prigozhin, to hand over their heavy weapons to Russia’s military. Prigozhin had said such moves were being taken ahead of a July 1 deadline for his fighters to sign contracts — which he opposed — with Russia’s military command.
Russian authorities also said Tuesday that they have closed a criminal investigation into the uprising and are pressing no armed rebellion charge against Prigozhin or his followers.
Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to set the stage for financial wrongdoing charges against an affiliated organization Prigozhin owns. Putin told a military gathering that Prigozhin’s Concord Group earned $941 million from a contract to provide the military with food, and that Wagner had received more than $1 billion in the last year for wages and additional items.
Russian private military contractor Wagner is busy boosting its brand as its fighters try to subdue Ukraine, trading secrecy for war propaganda movies.
“I hope that while doing so they didn’t steal anything, or stole not so much,” Putin said, adding that authorities would look closely at Concord’s contract.
For years, Prigozhin has enjoyed lucrative catering contracts with the Russian government. Police who searched his St. Petersburg office on Saturday said they found $48 million in trucks outside, according to media reports the Wagner boss confirmed. He said the money was intended to pay soldiers’ families.
Prigozhin and his fighters stopped the revolt on Saturday, less than 24 hours after it began and shortly after Putin spoke on national TV, branding the leaders of the rebellion, whom he did not name, as traitors.
The charge of mounting an armed mutiny could have been punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prigozhin’s escape from prosecution is in stark contrast to how the Kremlin has treated those staging anti-government protests in Russia, where many have received long sentences in notoriously harsh penal colonies.
Even far from Ukraine’s front lines, military funerals set off waves of mourning. ‘You can’t see an end to it,’ one chaplain says as the war drags on.
Lukashenko said some of the Wagner fighters are now in the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine that Russia illegally annexed in September.
The series of stunning events in recent days constitutes the gravest threat so far to Putin’s grip on power amid the 16-month-old war in Ukraine, and he again acknowledged the threat Tuesday, saying the result could have been a civil war.
In addresses this week, Putin has sought to project stability and demonstrate authority.
In a Kremlin ceremony Tuesday, the president walked down 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 to avert the rebellion.
In a further show of business-as-usual, Russian media showed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in his military uniform, greeting Cuba’s visiting defense minister in a pomp-heavy ceremony. Prigozhin has said his goal had been to oust Shoigu and other military brass, not stage a coup against Putin.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 29 years while relying on Russian subsidies and political support, portrayed the uprising as the latest development in a clash between Prigozhin and Shoigu. While the mutiny unfolded, he said, he put Belarus’ armed forces on a combat footing and urged Putin not to be hasty in his response, lest the conflict spiral out of control.
An explosion damaged a bridge that is one of the few links between the Crimean peninsula and Ukraine’s mainland, Russian-backed officials said.
He said he told Prigozhin he would be “squashed like a bug” if he tried to attack Moscow, and warned that the Kremlin would never agree to his demands.
Like Putin, the Belarusian leader portrayed the Ukraine war in terms of an existential threat to Russia, saying: “If Russia collapses, we all will perish under the debris.”
Belarus’ president has welcomed thousands of Russian troops to his country but has avoided having it take part directly in the fighting in Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to disclose any details about the Kremlin’s deal with the Wagner chief. He said only that Putin had provided Prigozhin with “certain promises … certain guarantees,” with the aim of avoiding a “worst-case scenario.”
Asked why the rebels were allowed to get as close as about 125 miles from Moscow without facing serious resistance, National Guard chief Viktor Zolotov told reporters, “We concentrated our forces in one fist closer to Moscow. If we spread them thin, they would have come like a knife through butter.”
Zolotov, a former Putin bodyguard, also said the National Guard lacks battle tanks and other heavy weapons and now would 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 news reports. The Defense Ministry didn’t release information about casualties, but Putin mentioned them Tuesday and honored those killed with a moment of silence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s KGB years in East Germany offer a window into his crackdown on protests, war on Ukraine and yearning for empire.
“Pilots, our combat comrades, died while confronting the mutiny,” he said. “They didn’t waver and fulfilled the orders and their military duty with dignity.”
Some Russian war bloggers and patriotic activists have vented outrage that Prigozhin and his troops won’t be punished for killing the airmen.
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Prigozhin voiced regret for the deaths in his statement Monday, but said Wagner troops fired because the aircraft were bombing them.
In his televised address Monday night, Putin said rebellion organizers had played into the hands of Ukraine’s government and its allies. He praised the rank-and-file mutineers, however, who “didn’t engage in fratricidal bloodshed and stopped on the brink.”
That was “likely in an effort to retain them” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because Moscow needs “trained and effective manpower” as it faces the early stages of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, according to the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War.
The institute also noted that the break between Putin and Prigozhin is likely beyond repair and that Moscow’s offer of Belarus as a haven for the Wagner chief and his loyalists could be a trap.
Putin has offered Prigozhin’s fighters the choice of either coming under Russian military command, leaving service or going to Belarus.
An explosion tore through a cafe in St. Petersburg, killing a military blogger who had supported the war in Ukraine.
Lukashenko said there was no reason to fear Wagner’s presence in his country, though in Russia there have been recent incidents of Wagner-recruited convicts being suspected of violent crimes.
The Wagner troops have “priceless” military knowledge and experience they can share with Belarus, Lukashenko said.
But exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who challenged Lukashenko in a 2020 election that was widely seen as fraudulent and triggered mass protests, said Wagner troops would threaten the country and its neighbors.
“Belarusians don’t welcome war criminal Prigozhin,” she told the Associated Press. “If Wagner sets up military bases on our territory, it will pose a new threat to our sovereignty and our neighbors.”
While attention focused on the aftermath of the Russian rebellion, the war in Ukraine continued to take a human toll in what U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink called “terrible scenes from another brutal attack.”
Russian forces struck Kramatorsk and a village nearby in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region with missiles, killing three people, including a child, and injuring more two dozen others, with still others under building rubble, authorities reported.
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