After the uprising of the Wagner group became known, the state security of Austria reacted, says the Minister of the Interior. Why: It’s about “buildings or people who might be in danger here.”
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) has not ruled out granting asylum to mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozchin. “With regard to the asylum, I would like to refer to what I have already said several times in this context: individual examinations are planned and this is also planned in the future,” Karner replied Monday in Vienna to a corresponding question.
Prigozhin rebelled against Russian military leadership over the weekend and sent his army into Moscow. According to reports, Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal between Prigozhin and Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin on Saturday night, which provides for impunity and exile for the head of the mercenary group Wagner in the neighboring western country. But there is no trace of Prigozhin since Saturday night.
Guaranteed “very consistent” security
Karner emphasized that events like the weekend in Russia “always have an impact on internal security.” “Immediately after the Wagner group became aware of these events, state security reacted and gave orders here to also increase police operations in some areas,” said the interior minister. For reasons of police tactics, “I didn’t want to say where”, but it was about “buildings or people who could be in danger here”. The task of ensuring the safety of Austrians “and the people who live here” is “very consistent”.
Karner was speaking on the sidelines of a meeting with his Slovak counterpart, Ivan Šimko, in Vienna. The former Slovak defense minister said the military and security significance of “this incident which started and ended on Saturday” should not be overestimated. “It has political significance and it shows the low stability of the political order in Russia.”
In this regard, Šimko drew a comparison with the Soviet military’s August coup against then-ruling Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. At the time, Šimko recalled that he himself was chairman of the defense committee in the then Czechoslovak parliament. The coup took place just a month after the last occupying Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia. “It was a security risk. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t managed to do this by leaving the Russian army beforehand.” (APA)