Belarusan President Alexander Lukashenko has confirmed that the founder of Russia's mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is now in Belarus, according to Belarusian state news agency BELTA. His plane reportedly landed in the capital, Misnk earlier on Tuesday.
More stories:
Under a deal mediated by Lukashenko on Saturday that ended a mutiny in Russia by the Wagner fighters, Prigozhin agreed to move to Belarus, while his men were given the choice of joining him or being integrated into Russia's regular armed forces.
2 View gallery
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Head of the Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin
(Photo: AFP)
Lukashenko also said his defense minister, Viktor Khrennikov, had told him he would not mind having a unit like Wagner in the Belarusian army. The Belarusian leader instructed Khrennikov to negotiate with Prigozhin on the matter.
The Federal Security Service in Russia (FSB) announced on Tuesday morning the closure of the investigation opened against Prigozhin, on suspicion of armed rebellion.
According to the flight data website Flightradar24, the Embraer Legacy 600 executive plane - which, according to US authorities, is "linked" to the Russian oligarch - took off at 2:32 a.m. from an airport in the Rostov region of Russia, the same region that his fighters invaded during the uprising, and landed at a military airport in the region Minsk at 4:20 a.m.
The reports of the plane landing in Minsk came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin stated, in a special speech broadcast to the Russian nation, that he would honor his promise as part of the agreement and allow the fighters of the Wagner Group to move to Belarus if they so desired. He added that they could also join the Russian army, or alternatively return to their homes and receive immunity from prosecution for participating in the rebellion. Putin did not specifically mention Prigozhin's name, and even promised that the planners of the rebellion would be prosecuted.
On Tuesday afternoon, Putin gave another speech, in what seemed like a show of strength against the backdrop of the biggest challenge to his rule since he came to power more than two decades ago: the Russian president addressed soldiers from the army and the National Guard in a square outside the Kremlin, on a red carpet laid out for him.
Putin thanked the fighters who, according to him, "stopped a civil war" in Russia, and claimed that his country was not forced to withdraw its military units currently stationed in Ukraine for this purpose. Putin, who in his speech Monday night admitted for the first time that Russian pilots were killed during the uprising, asked those present Tuesday in the square outside the Kremlin to observe a minute's silence in their memory. Moscow did not disclose how many pilots were killed when their aircraft were shot down by Wagner fighters, but some reports put the number at 13.
Also on Tuesday afternoon, Putin held a meeting with senior officials of the security establishment in the Kremlin, and claimed that the Wagner Group was completely funded by the Russian authorities. According to him, in just one year, from May 2022 to May this year, Moscow transferred 86 billion rubles to the organization (an amount equal to one billion dollars). Putin further claimed that Prigozhin himself made a huge fortune from his catering business in Russia, earning almost the same amount in that time.
2 View gallery
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses security forces outside the Kremlin in Moscow in the shadow of a failed uprising against his rule
(Photo: Reuters)
Earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov held a media briefing and rejected the assessments of commentators in the West, who said that Putin has suffered a severe blow to his image and that his status has weakened . When asked about this, Peskov claimed that "pseudo-experts" were spreading "hysteria."
There is also a "great consolidation" in the Russian public's support for Putin, Peskov said. "These events showed how united society is around the president," he said. Referring to the agreement with Prigozhin, Peskov added that Putin intends to abide by it and claimed that he "always kept his word."
Meanwhile, the world is wondering what will happen to the Wagner Group, whose fighters are considered the most effective of the Russian forces operating in Ukraine.
Prigozhin himself said in a recording released on Monday that, in the agreement between the parties reached through the mediation of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, he was offered "a legal framework" that will allow Wagner to continue operating on the territory of Belarus. But he did not elaborate beyond that, and Russia continues to signal that the intention is to integrate the organization's activities into the regular military forces. On Tuesday morning the Ministry of Defense in Moscow announced that Wagner is preparing to hand over the heavy military equipment it possesses.
The handover is part of a move that the Kremlin planned to make even before Prigozhin's rebellion, in an attempt to bring order to the organization in the shadow of the long-standing conflict between him and the senior military officials. Prigozhin admitted Monday that he started the rebellion in order to prevent the implementation of the move, which he said would have led to the dissolution of the organization.
In recent days, commentators around the world have wondered if Prigozhin will indeed stay in Belarus, even if he moves there for a while, and some believe that he may choose to continue from there to another destination where he can hide, perhaps in Africa. Lukashenko is Putin's closest ally – and many emphasize that if the top of the Russian regime wants to eliminate him, as it has already done to many of Putin's opponents, it can do it there very easily.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine there is hope that the chaos and division within Russia will help in the counteroffensive launched at the beginning of the month , in an attempt to free territories that the Russians have captured since the invasion last year, although senior officials in Kiev emphasized that they did not notice a collapse of the Russian defense lines, which are well fortified, and that the Russian fighters continue to put up significant resistance. The counter-offensive has so far progressed very slowly, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who admitted this himself in an interview he gave last week, sounded much more optimistic Monday night. In his nightly address to the nation, he reported on the achievements of his forces on all fronts, and said it was a "happy day."
He did not elaborate beyond that, but Ukrainian media reported that on the eastern front, Kiev's fighters took control of the village of Krasnohorivka in the Donetsk region, which has been controlled by pro-Russian rebels since the outbreak of the conflict in the region in 2014. The British Ministry of Defense assessed Tuesday morning in its daily intelligence update that these reports are indeed true that this is one of the few cases since the Russian invasion last year in which Ukrainian forces take over territory that the Russians occupied even before.