The flight of exile? This morning just before 7 Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal jet took off from Rostov to land shortly after in Minsk. There is no confirmation of the Wagner founder’s presence on board, but the twin-jet – an Embraer Legacy 600 with serial number RA02795 – is normally used for his travels.
Prigozhin’s transfer to Belarus is one of the conditions set in theagreement that interrupted the mercenaries’ march on Moscow on Saturday evening. The men in his private army can choose – as Putin recalled on Monday night in his message to the nation – whether to follow him or whether to join the regular armed forces, enlisting as “contract soldiers”.
The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko he had announced a speech yesterday evening, then postponed to this morning: it is not excluded that he could announce the arrival of “Putin’s cook” in his country. It has also been rumored that the construction of a stable base capable of accommodating eight thousand men from Wagner is underway. The dictator would like to use them as a deterrent against threats from Belarusian refugees, who have formed fighting groups in Ukraine and could follow the example of the “volunteers for freedom” who went on the attack in the Belgorod region.
In Minsk, the company name of Prigozhin’s Private Military Company could change to maintain formal independence from state institutions in Moscow: a necessary condition for presenting oneself with free hands in the unscrupulous relations with African dictatorshipsthe key to the parallel power network built by mercenaries between Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic and Sudan.