Whereabouts of mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin still unknown
27 June 2023, 09:24
The Kremlin had said he would be exiled to Belarus.
The whereabouts of mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin remained a mystery after Russian President Vladimir Putin once again blasted organisers of a weekend rebellion as traitors who played into the hands of Ukraine’s government and its allies.
The Kremlin has said Mr Prigozhin would be exiled to neighbouring Belarus, but neither he nor the Belarusian authorities have confirmed that.
An independent Belarus military monitoring project Belaruski Hajun said a business jet that Mr Prigozhin reportedly uses landed near Minsk on Tuesday morning.
The media team for Mr Prigozhin, the 62-year-old head of the Wagner private military contractor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr Prigozhin’s short-lived insurrection over the weekend, the biggest challenge to Mr Putin’s rule in more than two decades in power, has rattled Russia’s leadership.
Mr Putin on Monday night sought to project stability and control in a short, nationally televised address, in which he criticized the uprising’s “organisers”, without naming Mr Prigozhin.
He also praised Russian unity in the face of the crisis, as well as rank-and-file Wagner fighters for not letting the situation descend into “major bloodshed”.
Earlier in the day, Mr Prigozhin defended his actions in a defiant audio statement.
He again taunted the Russian military but said he had not been seeking to stage a coup against Mr Putin.
In another show of stability and control, the Kremlin on Monday night showed Mr Putin meeting with top security, law enforcement and military officials, including defence minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Mr Prigozhin had sought to remove.
Mr Putin thanked his team for their work over the weekend, implying support for the embattled Mr Shoigu.
Earlier, the authorities released a video of Mr Shoigu reviewing troops in Ukraine.
Mr Prigozhin’s fate is uncertain.
The Kremlin has promised to drop a criminal probe against him on the charges of mounting a rebellion, but Russian media reports Monday said the case has not been closed.
It also was not clear whether he would be able to keep his mercenary force.
In his speech, Mr Putin offered Mr Prigozhin’s fighters to either come under Russia’s defence ministry’s command, leave service or go to Belarus.
Mr Prigozhin said Monday, without elaborating, that the Belarus leadership proposed solutions that would allow Wagner to operate “in a legal jurisdiction”, but it was unclear what that meant.
