Lukashenko says Wagner chief is back in Russia

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin after the latter cut a deal to go into exile with Vladimir Putin in the face of his failed uprising against Moscow.

However, Prigozhin isn't in Belarus anymore according to recent comments Lukashenko made to CNN's Matthew Chance on July 7th, stating the mercenary captain was back in Russia.

“In terms of Yevgeny Prigozhin, he is in St. Petersburg. Or maybe this morning he would travel to Moscow or elsewhere,” Lukashenko told Chance during a press conference with international media in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. “But he is not on the territory of Belarus now.”

CNN reported that Prigozhin hasn't been seen in public since June 24th and footage from his recently raided home in St. Petersburg has raised some questions about what might have happened to the Wagner Group's founder.

The Kremlin refused to comment on Prigozhin's whereabouts according to CNN, telling the news organization that it did "not track his movements," adding that it had "neither the ability nor the desire to do so.”

The comments from the Kremlin seem a little farfetched. Moscow probably does have the ability to track the former mutineer and almost certainly would also have the desire to know where Prigozhin might be at all times considering the risk he posed to Putin's rule during his 48-hour armed rebellion.

“What will happen to Prigozhin next? Well, everything happens in life. But if you think that Putin is so malicious and vindictive that he will ‘kill’ Prigozhin tomorrow – no, this will not happen,” Lukashenko said during his press conference when asked about what might happen to the Wagner Group leader.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a name that everyone has become familiar with thanks to the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin shocked the world over the weekend of June 24th when his mercenary group decided to rebel against Putin and turned their sights on Moscow.

Only hours after Yevgeny Prigozhin made his now infamous deal with the Kremlin to halt his armed rebellion and accept exile in Belarus people started asking what happened to the Wagner Group leader and if his short-lived mutiny turned him into a Ukrainian hero. 

Little is still known about the deal struck between Prigozhin and the Kremlin but some of the agreement was made public. Prigozhin accepted exile in Belarus while the soldiers who supported him would not be prosecuted by Moscow according to the Associated Press. 

Wagner Group troops that stayed out of the revolt were to be offered contracts to fight with the Russian Armed Forces directly, which the Associated Press noted would put them under the control of the very military leaders Prigozhin was marching to overthrow.

Beyond the points already laid out, we didn't know if Prigozhin would be allowed to take the soldiers who rebelled with him to Belarus and keep the Wagner Group operational, or if the mercenary unit will be disbanded after its remaining troops join the Russian military. 

“What we don’t know, but will discover in the next hours and days is, how many of his fighters have gone with him… if he has gone to Belarus and kept an effective fighting force around him, then he presents a threat,” Lord Richard Dannatt told Sky News. 

Lord Dannatt is the United Kingdom’s former Chief of the General Staff and was noting that a strong Prigozhin with a portion of men at his back could still pose a threat to Ukraine, though that would dispel the myth that the Wagner Group founder was a hero in Kyiv. 

Despite his rebellion, Prigozhin and his mercenaries are likely still viewed as monsters who committed some of the worst atrocities in the country after Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion, though only a handful of evidence against Wagner has reached the public. 

In April 2023, former Wagner mercenary Alexey Savichev admitted to The Guardian’s Pjotr Sauer via telephone that he participated in the execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war and also said that he and his compatriots had also tortured captured soldiers. 

“We were told not to take any prisoners, and just shoot them on the spot,” Savichev said according to The Guardian. “We sprayed them with our bullets… It is war and I do not regret a single thing I did there. If I could, I would go back,” the former Wagnerite added. 

“We would torture soldiers too, there weren’t any rules,” Savichev admitted, whose first account of his time in Ukraine was published by Gulagu.net alongside that of Azamat Uldarov, another Wagner fighter who admitted to killing Ukrainian civilians and children. 

"She was screaming, she was a little kid, she was five or six and I shot her, a kill shot. I wasn’t allowed to let anyone out, you understand?” The Guardian quoted Uldarov as saying to Russian human rights activist and Gulagu.net founder Vladimir Ovechkin. 

Fortunately, Prigozhin’s loss was Ukraine’s gain and it does look like the Wagner Group will not continue to exist in the form that had been such an effective tool for the type of war Putin’s generals have waged in Ukraine according to The Atlantic’s Elliot Ackerman. 

Ackerman argued in a June 26th article that up until Progozhin’s rebellion, the Russian Armed Forces had waged a war based on a strategy of attrition. But the most effective soldiers Russia had to fight an attritional war, the Wagner Group, “now ceased to exist.”

“The loss of the Wagner Group necessitates that Putin rely wholly on the Russian military. This reduces his ability to insulate the Russian population from the costs of war, diminishing the political space for such an approach, ” Ackerman continued. 

“The purpose of the march was to prevent the destruction of PMC Wagner and to bring to justice those who, through their unprofessional actions, made a huge number of mistakes during the special military operation,” Prigozhin said according to CNN. 

CNN also reported that Prigozhin saw his march on Moscow as a protest rather than an attempt to overthrow the government. Adding that no soldiers were killed and that he regretted that some aircraft that were bombing Wagner on their march had to be destroyed. 

Putin responded to Prigozhin without mentioning him in a public address and said that the Wagner Group troops made the “right decision” by halting their march according to a CNN report, adding that the ​​“armed rebellion would have been suppressed anyway.” However, only time will tell what will ultimately happen to Prigozhin...