Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko confirmed Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a mutiny in Russia over the weekend, will be in Belarus on Tuesday under a deal that ended his revolt.
“I can see Prigozhin is already flying on the plane. Yes, indeed, today he is in Belarus,” Lukashenko said in a meeting with Belarusian officers, according to state media.
It was not clear if the Wagener leader had already arrived in Belarus or was still in the air.
Prigozhin, a 62-year-old former petty thief who rose to become Russia’s most powerful mercenary, was last seen in public when he left the southern Russian city of Rostov on Saturday, shaking hands and quipping that he had “cheered up” people.
Flightradar24 showed an Embraer Legacy 600 busi-ness jet appeared in Rostov region at 0232 GMT and began a descent at 0420 GMT near Minsk.
The identification codes of the aircraft matched those of a jet linked by the United States to Autolex Transport, which is linked to Prigozhin by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control that enforces sanc-tions.
Under a deal mediated by Lukashenko on Saturday to halt a mutiny by Prigozhin’s mercenary fighters, Prigozhin was meant to move to Belarus.
In an address to the nation late on Monday, Putin said the leaders of what he called the “armed mu-tiny” had betrayed Russia and the Russian people but thanked the army, law enforcement and special services for resisting the mutineers.
The 70-year-old Kremlin chief paid tribute to pilots killed during the mutiny and said he had ordered Russian forces to avoid further bloodshed, thanking those mercenaries in Wagner who stepped back from the brink of “armed rebellion” and bloodshed on Saturday.
Prigozhin’s “march for justice”, which he said was aimed at settling scores with Putin’s military top brass whom he cast as treasonous and corrupt, has raised the prospect of turmoil in Russia while un-dermining Putin’s reputation as unchallenged leader.
Prigozhin said on Monday that the mutiny had been intended not to overthrow Russia’s government but to register a protest over what he said was its inef-fectual conduct of the war in Ukraine.
“We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government,” he said in an 11-minute audio message released on the Telegram messaging app.
The Federal Security Service said it had dropped a criminal case against Prigozhin for armed mutiny while the defence ministry said Wagner group was preparing to hand over its heavy military equipment to the army.—AFP
