Russia’s top mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin has probably been murdered after leading a failed rebellion against the Kremlin regime, a former senior US military leader has suggested.
Prigozhin, the Wagner Group chief, ordered his soldiers to march on Moscow last month amid an ongoing feud with Russia’s top military brass about its strategy in the Ukraine war.
“I personally don’t think he is, and if he is, he’s in a prison somewhere,” Robert Abrams, a retired general, told ABC News when asked if he thought the warlord was alive.
The Kremlin claimed that president Vladimir Putin met with Prigozhin five days after the latter stood down his troops.
But Prigozhin has not been seen in public since then and general Abrams cast doubt on whether the meeting ever actually took place.
“I’d be surprised if we actually see proof of life that Putin met with Prigozhin, and I think it’s highly staged,” he said.
The move by Prigozhin, viewed by some in Russia as a potential successor to Putin, plunged the country into a temporary meltdown.
On 24 June Prigozhin claimed to have taken control of all of Russia’s military sites in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and demanded that the military leadership come to him after accusing them of killing his forces with a rocket attack on the front line.
He vowed to take “revenge” for the deaths and to “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of this country” in an extraordinary series of audio clips published the night before.
Some reports suggest Prigozhin is in Belarus— (PRIGOZHIN PRESS SERVICE)
Images and video circulating on social media showed armed men on the streets of Rostov, skirting the regional police headquarters in the city on foot, as well as tanks positioned outside the headquarters of the Southern Military District - key to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It sparked a huge security response in Moscow, where anti-terrorist measures were put in place and additional checks on roads, with unconfirmed footage showing military vehicles on the streets.
Russia’s FSB Security Service, meanwhile, opened a criminal case for armed mutiny against Prigozhin and said his statements and actions constituted “calls for the start of an armed civil conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation”.
Prigozhin later called off the rebellion, saying he wanted to avoid “bloodshed” and the charges against him were later dropped.
Putin conceded in a speech to military personnel in Moscow that a civil war had been narrowly avoided and some analysts suggested that his authority had been badly damaged by the public spat between Wagner and the Kremlin.
The Kremlin suggested Prigozhin would be exiled to Belarus as punishment but his whereabouts since the failed rebellion have remained a mystery. His fellow mercenaries involved in the rebellion were also reportedly being allowed to leave to Belarus.
But neither Russia nor Belarus has confirmed where Prigozhin is. Belaruski Hajun, an independent Belarusian military monitoring project, said a business jet that Prigozhin reportedly uses landed near Minsk on the morning of 27 June.
On Wednesday this week Russia’s defiance ministry said the Wagner Group was completing the handover of its weapons to the military.
The disarming of Wagner reflects efforts by authorities to defuse the threat it posed and also appears to herald an end to the mercenary group’s operations on the battlefield in Ukraine.
