WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) – After the end of the brief armed uprising by the Wagner mercenary group against the Russian military leadership, Western experts expect further negotiations on the future of the fighters. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin may have returned to Russia to negotiate the details of an agreement with the authorities, the US Institute for War Studies (ISW) wrote in Washington on Wednesday (local time). The Russian authorities had previously dropped criminal proceedings against Prigozhin and the Wagner army. In Russia, Prigozhin is the head of the Concord company empire, whose future is also to be regulated.
Former Russian intelligence officer and prominent military blogger Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, wrote on Thursday that Prigozhin was “apparently” in his hometown of St. Petersburg. There is also the headquarters of the company empire. From there, the 62-year-old also controlled his pro-Russian and anti-Western disinformation campaigns on the Internet.
The ISW experts emphasized that there is no reliable evidence that Prigozhin left Belarus again to continue negotiations, but this is possible. At the same time, they pointed to numerous reports by bloggers that Prigozhin was having new camps set up for his troops in Belarus.
Ruler Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk had mediated in the uprising that ended on Saturday and then confirmed on Monday that the Wagner boss was in Belarus. Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin had called the Wagner rebels “traitors” but then offered them to go to Belarus. At the same time, he offered fighters loyal to the Kremlin to sign a contract with the military.
Putin also said that the Wagner army was fully funded by the Russian state. He had said in February 2022 that the Russian state had nothing to do with the troops. According to Putin, Prigozhin’s Concord group earned billions by providing food for the Russian armed forces, for example. The Kremlin now wants to have Prigozhin’s business checked./mau/DP/stw