Russia’s top mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin has probably been murdered, after a failed rebellion against the Kremlin regime.
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.
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.
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.
A major security response occurred in Moscow, prompting the implementation of anti-terrorist measures and increased road checks. Unverified footage indicated the presence of military vehicles in the streets.
The Russian FSB Security Service initiated a criminal case against Prigozhin for armed mutiny, alleging that his statements and actions incited armed conflict within Russia. Prigozhin later canceled the rebellion, citing a desire to prevent bloodshed, and the charges against him were dropped.
Putin acknowledged in a speech to military personnel in Moscow that a civil war had narrowly been averted, leading some analysts to believe that his authority had been significantly undermined by the public dispute between Wagner and the Kremlin. The Kremlin proposed exiling Prigozhin to Belarus as a punishment, but his current whereabouts remain unknown.
It was reported that a business jet associated with Prigozhin landed near Minsk on the morning of June 27, according to Belaruski Hajun, an independent Belarusian military monitoring project.
The Russian defense ministry recently announced that the Wagner Group was in the process of surrendering its weapons to the military.
The disarmament of Wagner signifies the authorities’ efforts to neutralize the group’s threat and potentially marks the end of its operations on the Ukrainian battlefield.
