FROM OUR REPORTER
KIEV – Already murdered, or a refugee in Belarus, or fleeing disguised to avoid assassins, quiet in his offices in St. Petersburg, but perhaps still among his guerrillas in the Rostov enclave, from where he would go to the capital in recent days Russia to meet Putin in person: what happened to Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Three weeks after the failed coup in Moscow, the mysterious epic of mercenary militia leader Wagner is becoming the destabilizing metaphor of the uncertainties and fragility that grip the Russian regime. A weakness that is now also reflected in international relations: South Africa is discreetly putting pressure on Putin to avoid participating in the mid-August summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to avoid having to violate the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court.
In any case, there is no certain news of Prigozhin, therefore all the rumors and half-tracks become the subject of conjecture. Yesterday an image of him appeared on Wagner’s social channels, in which he is described in a militia camp in Belarus. “Prigozhin early in the morning two days ago,” they write on Telegram, without however offering other concrete evidence. President Lukashenko a few days ago denied he was in his country.
Putin also speaks of him, who in an interview with the newspaper Kommersant recounts for the first time that, following the armed revolt of the Wagner stopped on 24 July 200 kilometers from Moscow, it was he himself who invited Prigozhin to his office. The meeting would then take place on July 29 together with 34 other senior militia officers. At that juncture the Russian president, who in the most serious hours of the coup had publicly declared his firm will to “punish the traitors”, would have offered the mutineers to continue to serve in the same role as before under the command of one of their officers, Andrei Troshev, who has been known for his activity in Syria since the creation of Wagner in 2014. With statements that seem to want to marginalize Prigozhin, Putin specifies that he would have immediately rejected the offer, without realizing, however, that several officers behind his back wanted to accept it. Could the interview actually be a way to announce the end of Wagner’s leader, without, however, depriving the militia of its role, which continues to operate profitably for the regime between Africa and the Middle East?
What is evident, however, is that Wagner no longer plays any relevant role in the ranks of the Russian army deployed in Ukraine. Pentagon spokesmen said last night that the militia no longer has any weight in military operations and its mercenaries have by now been integrated into regular units. The same observation was made to us in the last two weeks by Ukrainian officers, who operate on the Bakhmut front, in Donbass, where from June 2022 to last May Prigozhin and his best units had taken the lion’s share.
«It must be said that Wagner is no longer there today. And this seems to facilitate the work of the Russian commands, which in recent months were continually annoyed by the jealousies and competitions between Wagner and regular units. Furthermore, we no longer see the single-use soldiers, the ex-prisoners in the Wagner who died like flies in the first charge», they explain.