Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is in Russia and is a “free man” despite staging a rebellion against Moscow’s military leadership, the leader of Belarus said Thursday, deepening the mystery of where Prigozhin and his Wagner group stand and what will become of them.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko told reporters that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg, Russia, as of Thursday morning, and then “maybe he went to Moscow, maybe somewhere else, but he is not on the territory of Belarus.”
It was Lukashenko who brokered a deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin to end the brief mutiny. He said days later that the Wagner leader had gone to Belarus, although it is not clear whether that actually happened.
Prigozhin is at liberty for now, Lukashenko said, although he conceded that he “did not know what would happen later,” and he brushed off the idea that Putin would simply have Prigozhin — until recently a vital ally — killed.
“If you think that Putin is so malicious and vindictive that he will kill Prigozhin tomorrow — no, this will not happen,” he said.
If Prigozhin is, in fact, free and in Russia less than two weeks after staging what the Kremlin called an attempted coup, it would be one of the more perplexing twists in a story full of them. On Wednesday, a prominent current-affairs television show broadcast video of what it claimed was a police search of his opulent mansion in St. Petersburg, where it said large amounts of cash, firearms, passports, wigs and drugs had been found. A spokesperson for Prigozhin denied that the house was his.
Some Russian news outlets reported that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg on Wednesday or Thursday. A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said the Wagner leader had been in Russia for much of the time since the mutiny, but the official said it was not clear whether he had been in Belarus, in part because Prigozhin apparently uses body doubles to disguise his movements.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, deflected a question about Prigozhin’s whereabouts, saying the government had “neither the ability nor the desire” to track his movements.
In a rare news conference with local and foreign journalists at the marbled presidential palace in Minsk, Lukashenko, always eager to be seen as an international statesman, clearly enjoyed the limelight cast on him by the most dramatic challenge to Putin’s authority in his 23 years in power. But days after offering a haven to Wagner fighters and their leader in his country, Lukashenko gave no clarity about where they would go or what role they would play.
Although Lukashenko, has ruled his country for 29 years, continued to boast of his mediation and peacemaking, he also made clear his deference, even subservience, to Russia and Putin, whom he referred to multiple times as “big brother.”
“The main question of where Wagner will be deployed and what will it do — it doesn’t depend on me; it depends on the leadership of Russia,” he said. He added that he had spoken to Prigozhin on Wednesday and that Wagner would continue to “fulfill its duties to Russia for as long as it can,” although he did not elaborate.
Putin has long sought to pull Belarus deeper into the Russian political, economic and military orbits. For years, Lukashenko, whose power depends heavily on managing that relationship, did well enough to maintain some independence and even tried to build trade ties to the West.
But that faded after Putin helped him brutally suppress opposition protests in 2020, starting a period of increased repression in which critics of the government were jailed or fled into exile. Under Western sanctions and increasingly treated as an international pariah, Belarus has became ever more reliant on Russia for economic aid, energy, high-tech imports and diplomatic support.
In February, when Putin thanked him for traveling to Moscow for a meeting, Lukashenko, in a remark caught by television cameras, replied: “As if I could not agree.”
A year earlier, Lukashenko had allowed Putin to launch one thrust of his war of Ukraine from Belarusian soil, and this year, he allowed Russia to station nuclear-armed short-range missiles there. But he has so far resisted efforts to pull Belarus’ military directly into the war.
During the Wagner uprising, Lukashenko played go-between, speaking with Prigozhin and Putin. He later boasted that he had made peace between them, persuading the Wagner leader to stand down and the Russian president “not to do anything rash,” such as having Prigozhin killed or the mutiny crushed in bloody fashion. His claims could not be verified.
Wagner’s mercenaries have made up some of the most brutal and effective units fighting in Ukraine for Russia, and they took the lead in capturing the city of Bakhmut after a long and very brutal battle. But Putin and his government have opted to end Wagner’s independence, requiring its fighters in Ukraine to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense — a main cause of Prigozhin’s mutiny.
Lukashenko said last week that he had offered Wagner fighters an “abandoned” military base in Belarus, and satellite images showed temporary structures being built at a deserted base about 80 miles from Minsk.
But on Thursday, he said members of Prigozhin’s mercenary force remained in their “permanent camps,” believed to be in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine.
“Whether they will come here, and if so, how many of them will come, we will decide in the future,” he said.
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