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Russia’s top mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin was likely assassinated after leading a failed insurgency against the Kremlin regime, a former senior US military leader has suggested.
Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, last month ordered his soldiers to march on Moscow amid an ongoing feud with Russia’s top military officials over its strategy in the Ukraine war.
“Personally, I don’t think he is, and if he is, he’s in prison somewhere,” Robert Abrams, a retired general, told ABC News when asked if he thought the warlord was alive .
The Kremlin claimed President Vladimir Putin met with Prigozhin five days after his troops withdrew.
But Prigozhin has not been seen in public since, and General Abrams has expressed doubts as to whether the meeting ever actually took place.
“I would be surprised if we actually saw evidence that Putin met with Prigozhin, and I think that’s heavily staged,” he said.
The move by Prigozhin, seen by some in Russia as a potential successor to Putin, plunged the country into temporary collapse.
On June 24, Prigozhin claimed control of all Russian military bases in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and urged the military leadership to come to him after accusing them of destroying his troops in a front-line missile attack to have killed.
In an extraordinary series of audio clips released the night before, he vowed to “take revenge” for the deaths and “stop the evil done by this country’s military leadership.”
According to some reports, Prigozhin is located in Belarus
(PRIGOZHIN PRESS SERVICE)
Pictures and videos circulating on social media showed gunmen on the streets of Rostov, walking around the city’s regional police headquarters, and tanks stationed outside the headquarters of the southern military district — key to the Russian invasion Ukraine.
It prompted a violent response from security forces in Moscow, where anti-terrorist measures and additional roadside checks were introduced. Unconfirmed footage showed military vehicles on the streets.
The Russian secret service FSB, meanwhile, opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for armed mutiny, saying his statements and actions constituted “calls for the start of an armed civil war on the territory of the Russian Federation”.
Prigozhin later called off the uprising on the grounds that he wanted to avoid “bloodshed,” after which the charges against him were later dropped.
Putin, in a speech to military officials in Moscow, conceded that civil war had been narrowly avoided, and some analysts suspected his authority had been severely damaged by the public dispute between Wagner and the Kremlin.
The Kremlin proposed exiling Prigozhin to Belarus as punishment, but his whereabouts since the failed uprising remains a mystery. According to reports, his fellow mercenaries involved in the rebellion were also allowed to travel to Belarus.
But neither Russia nor Belarus have confirmed where Prigozhin is. Belarusski Hajun, an independent Belarusian military surveillance project, said a business jet allegedly using Prigozhin landed near Minsk on the morning of June 27.
On Wednesday this week, Russia’s Defense Ministry said the Wagner Group was finalizing the transfer of its weapons to the military.
Wagner’s disarmament reflects the authorities’ efforts to defuse the threat she poses, and also appears to herald an end to the mercenary group’s operations on the battlefield in Ukraine.