The head of the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, could already be in exile in Belarus, three days after leading the abortive military rebellion that kept Russia in suspense for 24 hours and put the country on the brink of a violent armed confrontation. A plane linked to the businessman landed this Tuesday morning in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, from Russia.
The plane was detected by the Flightradar24 flight tracking website. It would be an Embraer Legacy 600, whose identification codes match a plane linked to Prigozhin in US sanctions documents.
The Belarusian Gayun investigative team, which is dedicated to monitoring military activity in its country, claimed that Prigozhin’s private plane had landed at the Machulischi military airfield near Minsk.
According to Flightradar24, before reaching the small ex-Soviet country, the plane appeared over Rostov-on-Don, the southern Russian city that Wagner Group fighters took control of last Saturday.
According to the agreement that managed to end this crisis, reached on Saturday night with the mediation of the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin must leave Russia and go into exile in Belarus.
Wagner’s boss confirmed that he would go into exile at Lukashenko’s invitation. But no details were given about how it would be carried out and Prigozhin’s whereabouts have remained unknown to the public since he left Rostov-on-Don on Saturday night in an all-terrain vehicle, from which he smiled as he greeted several inhabitants of the city.
The Russian investigative portal “Important Stories” located Prigozhin on Sunday in Saint Petersburg, where he would have arrived by plane from Rostov. According to the Gayun team, a plane from the former Russian imperial capital also landed at the Machulischi airfield on Tuesday.
Asked about Prigozhin, the Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, said he did not have “any information” about his whereabouts.
In exchange for leaving Russia, Moscow would close the open indictment against Prigozhin for organizing an armed rebellion, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly the KGB) withdrew on Tuesday the open criminal charges against the mercenaries of the Wagner Group for participating in the armed rebellion last weekend. According to Ría Nóvosti, this is because “the participants had ceased the actions aimed at committing the crime.”
On the other hand, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the process has been launched for the Wagner Group to integrate into the Russian Army. “Preparations for the transfer of heavy military equipment from Wagner to active units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are underway,” the department said in a statement.
In a televised address to the nation on Monday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Wagner’s militiamen to join the Russian Army or go to Belarus with Prigozhin.
