A top Russian general has reportedly been arrested for having knowledge of Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin's weekend rebellion.
General Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed "General Armageddon" by the Russian press for his aggressive tactics in the Syrian conflict, has been missing since Saturday when his troops launched an armed revolt.
Wagner mercenaries left Ukraine to seize a military headquarters in a southern Russian city, before turning around some 200km from Moscow and their boss abruptly calling off the uprising.
The 56-year-old second-in-command of the Russian armed forces is said to be under interrogation.
"Apparently, he [Surovikin] chose Prigozhin's side during the uprising" and they have gotten ahold of him," the Moscow Times quoted a source as saying.
Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the shuttered Ekho Moskvy radio station, on Wednesday wrote on Telegram that General Surovikin has not been in contact with his family for three days.
US officials on Wednesday said the general was sympathetic to the mercenary chief, although it was unclear if he actively supported it.
The Kremlin, however, played down the report, saying that there was and would be a lot of "speculation and gossip", suggesting that Vladimir Putin had not given in to Mr Prigozhin’s demands for an imminent reshuffle of the Russian military's top brass.
Rybar, an influential channel on Telegram run by a former Russian defence ministry press officer, said a “purge” was underway.
He said the authorities were trying to “weed out” military personnel deemed to have shown "a lack of decisiveness" in putting down the mutiny amid some reports that parts of the armed forces appear to have done little to stop Wagner fighters in the initial stage of the rebellion.
"The armed insurgency by the Wagner private military company has become a pretext for a massive purge in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces," said Rybar.
The Wagner Group is a private military company under the control of Mr Prigozhin that cut its teeth in deployments to Crimea and eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014 and has since dispatched troops to several conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, including the Syrian Civil War.
In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagner has proven indispensable, but an apparent power struggle between the Kremlin and the outspoken Mr Prigozhin has led to the group having its wings clipped by Moscow.
The friction escalated to a crisis point on Friday 23 June, when Mr Prigozhin accused his country’s defence ministry, Sergei Shoigu, of “destroying” his fighters and concocting lies to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Mr Prigozhin called for armed mutiny in an explosive rant on Telegram in which he vowed to stop the “evil” of the Kremlin’s top brass.
The Wagner Group’s leader did not go after Mr Putin in his tirade, instead alleging that for more than a year and over 350,000 casualties into the war — a large part of which Mr Prigozhin’s group is responsible for — the Russian president had been deceived by Mr Shoigu.
Apart from Mr Surovikin, another top general has been away from public view since the mutiny or mentioned in a defence ministry press release since 9 June either.
Valery Gerasimov is the commander of Russia's war in Ukraine, and the holder of one of Russia's three "nuclear briefcases," according to some Western military analysts.
