Sao Paulo
The suspicious death of mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was preceded by an escalation of his falling out with the defense leadership over his Wagner Group’s activities outside Russia from where he had ended up being banned after leading an unprecedented mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s generals in the June.
Prigoyin died on Wednesday (23) after the Embraer Legacy 600 jet he was aboard crashed during a flight between Moscow and St Petersburg, in a pattern suggesting a violent explosion on board or an unlikely catastrophic failure of a model suggesting that speed is known for its high reliability. .
In the West, and even among Prigojin supporters, accusatory fingers are turned to Putin, who, with his tsarist autonomy, is seen as the beginning and end of every crisis in Russia. The Kremlin dismissed the conclusion as a lie, bolstered by the long list of the president’s enemies who have been oddly killed over the years, but the mercenary’s multiple interests thicken the script.
Since the uprising, Prigoyin has met with Putin at least once, five days after the uprising ended. They had known each other since the 1990s and the businessman earned the nickname “Putin’s Chef” for providing food services to the government. Now the Kremlin is beginning to remember that the Wagner Group, which was founded in 2014, never had a legal existence in Russia although according to the president himself, it receives $1 billion (about R$5 billion) annually from the government ) earned ) to your activities.
However, nothing was said about the group’s external activities, its gold mine in some cases, as in Mali, an almost literal metaphor given that some 2,000 of the group’s soldiers work for the government, which protects mining of the metal. They arrived in 2021, edging French rivals out of the role, and in return Wagner was given mining and export licenses of its own.
It is a standard in operations in the seven African countries where the group’s presence is confirmed, which began in 2018 in Sudan and the Central African Republic. In the second country, Wagner acts as the Praetorian Guard for the elite, receiving permits for ores, timber, and even the production of beer for such purposes.
According to research by the British newspaper Financial Times, it generated sales of US$250 million (R$1.25 billion) by 2021. It is no coincidence that the evil eye of Russian actors since Prigoyin has signed his political death warrant by defying Putin, even though his target was Minister Serguei Choigu (Defense) and he intended to frame the mercenaries for deployment in Ukraine.
The differences of opinion between the two were public about the handling of the conflict, which Wagner felt was catastrophic. However, other critics, such as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, balked at a direct confrontation.
According to a person close to the military leadership, he said Sheet, the race is now double. First, Putin wants to impose total control over Wagner’s perhaps 25,000 men — nothing is certain from the numbers of Prigoyin’s nebulous organization that keeps companies controlling the flow of capital in the United Arab Emirates and other countries without Western sanctions under the radar .
This first step was taken with the decree published on Saturday (26th), according to which all Wagner members must swear allegiance to Russia. It doesn’t matter if someone gave the order to kill Prigojin or who did it: the message is clear about loyalties and what can happen to those who violate them whatever the purpose of the mutiny, it was was a political disaster for Putin.
It was primarily aimed at fighters living under the Allied dictatorship in Belarus, where they represent a destabilizing element for the eastern borders of NATO, the western military alliance. Poland and Lithuania have repeatedly said they will close their borders if there are Wagnerian movements in their vicinity.
The second part is more complex and already underway, namely the dispute over the mercenary’s loot. Prigoyin was banned from trading in Russia as punishment for the failed uprising and began to devote himself to saving his international empire, which Putin had apparently spared. Apparently optical. On the eve of the plane crash, the influential IunusBek Ievkurov, one of the country’s ten deputy defense ministers, paid an unprecedented visit to troubled Libya, where Russia has for years supported warlord Khalifa Haftar’s faction.
Until then, service in Moscow was provided by Wagner, who had 2,000 men in the country including fighter support. According to the unanimous report of Arab and Russian media, Ievkurov warned that the mercenaries would leave the country by September and be replaced by regular troops from Moscow.
Before he flew to Libya, he conveyed the same message to Syrian defense chief Ali Mahmoud Abbas. Putin intervened in the civil war there in 2015 and saved the dictatorship of Bashar alAssad. The armed forces had already driven the Wagners out of their main base, Hmeimin Airport, and now want to take the mercenaries out of the country.
Wellknown investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov said in Telegram he suspects that this will also be the case in Wagner’s other markets in Africa. The irritation was visible: Putin said Prigoyin died after returning from a trip from the mainland, which observers on the Russian scene said was due to Ievkurov’s movements.
Add to that the fortunes amassed by Prigojin, scattered in a quagmire of offshore and shell companies. According to Venda FlebabBrown, Director of NonState Armed Actors at the Brookings Institute (USA), Wagner earned US$20 billion (R$100 billion) in his brief history.