Yevgeny Prigozhin announcing that his Wagner troops had entered Rostov-on-Don over the weekend. Photo / AP
Yevgeny Prigozhin announcing that his Wagner troops had entered Rostov-on-Don over the weekend. Photo / AP
The dust has barely settled since the oligarch and Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin shook the world with his rebellion in Russia on Friday – but he is already reportedly starting his new life in exile in Minsk.
His private jet left Rostov, the Russian city of one million people that he captured on Saturday, and landed in Belarus – and Russia’s intelligence services said that they had dropped a criminal case against him. It’s caused alarm in Baltic states, as Latvia and Lithuania have called for Nato to strengthen its eastern borders in case they become targets as this suspected war criminal takes shelter nearby.
Prigozhin, having previously been Putin’s right-hand man, has alienated himself with his coup and become a security risk. So what does this formerly influential military chief’s life look like now and how did his relationship with the Russian leader unravel on such a dramatic scale?
Under the agreed peace deal that ended his rebellion, Prigozhin now faces a potentially frustrating, nerve-jangling life in exile in Minsk, a staid city that can’t compete with Moscow or St Petersburg for nightlife and drama, or, for that matter, with Ukraine’s battlefields for derring-do and camaraderie.
It will be painful for Prigozhin, a man who thrives on knowing he has influence and can act as the playmaker. He is accused of manipulating the 2016 US presidential election with “troll factories” and has clearly relished commanding Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East. Now he is cast out, with the grim knowledge of what Putin does to traitors.
Many of Russian President Vladimir Putin's enemies die by falling from buildings or being poisoned. Photo / AP
“The usual jokes about windows and cups of tea apply here,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst, in a reference to the large number of Putin’s enemies who fall from buildings or are poisoned, Alexander Litvinenko among them.
Prigozhin will not be the only exile living in Minsk, constantly looking over his shoulder for assassins. He will have 73-year-old Kurmanbek Bakiyev, a reportedly corrupt former president of ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who was overthrown in a revolution in 2010, for company.
Nobody yet knows how Prigozhin will live in Minsk but if Bakiyev’s experience is anything to go by, he should be relatively free. Bakiyev has been photographed alongside Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko inspecting expansion plans for Minsk. In 2019, Lukashenko even gave Bakiyev a painting of nomads and a knife for his 70th birthday.
Lukashenko, a man renowned for his vanity, appears to enjoy the limelight that his high-profile guests bring and he has already said that he is looking forward to “learning” about Wagner’s experience in Ukraine.
Yevgeny Prigozhin has gone into exile in Minsk after he led a rebellion. Photo / AP
This is an alarming prospect for Belarus’s EU neighbours. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group has been called a “transnational criminal organisation” by the US government. Its ranks are filled with former Russian soldiers, convicted rapists and murderers.
Sergey Radchenko, a British historian, said that the hyperactive Prigozhin may already be planning to run Wagner’s lucrative Africa operations from Minsk. This is a sort of consultancy service for autocrats that offers a suite of services from how to influence elections, to bodyguards and bloodthirsty mercenary fighters.
“It will be interesting to see if Wagner is redeployed to Belarus,” says Radchenko. “I can’t see them taking part in the war effort in Ukraine. African operations will probably continue, though, but at whose behest? Moscow’s? Minsk’s?”
It is not known if Prigozhin’s family will join him. He is married to Lyubov Prigozhina, a pharmacist-turned-businesswoman who owns a string of successful spas in Saint Petersburg. They have three adult children, two daughters, Polina and Veronika, and a son, Pavel. Until the start of the war with Ukraine, Pavel and Polina travelled around the EU, enjoying the high life in various capitals and were even photographed competing in show jumping events in Spain.
For all the Prigozhin patriarch’s experience in the Wagner group, he was an accidental coup leader. His rebellion fizzled out on Saturday evening with his fighters only 193km from Moscow when he realised that he had overplayed his hand.
Members of the Wagner Group military company load their tank on to a truck on a street in Rostov-on-Don at the weekend before leaving the area. Photo / AP
What was supposed to have been an eye-catching stunt by Prigozhin to raise the profile of his Wagner mercenary group, which he loves, and to undermine the Russian Ministry of Defence, which he hates, has destroyed him and humiliated Vladimir Putin, the man he loyally served for 25 years as a sort of super-fixer. His friendship with Putin, the most valuable asset a Russian official can have, has been smashed forever. This rebellion was just supposed to be the media-savvy former restaurateur’s biggest headline-grabber yet.
Prigozhin may have felt compelled to trigger his “March of Justice”, as he called it, on Friday evening because the Kremlin had ordered Russian mercenaries to subvert themselves to the military by July 1, a humiliating and inconceivable act for Wagner. The plan was to march on Rostov, trigger a standoff with the Russian army and then open negotiations which he hoped would discredit Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s Minister of Defence, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the military.
Prigozhin has picked various fights with members of the Russian elite but his most vicious is with Shoigu. Snarling with barely contained rage in videos, set in destroyed and blood-soaked Bakhmut, Prigozhin has called Shoigu lazy, a cowardly grandpa, incompetent. He feels that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has failed because of Shoigu and that thousands of Russian soldiers died unnecessarily.
The plan was never to challenge Putin for power, as Prigozhin admitted on Monday, two days after the end of the rebellion. He didn’t want a fight. He just wanted publicity.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has been roundly criticised by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Photo / AP
“We did not want to shed Russian blood,” he said in an audio message posted on the Telegram app, although Wagner did shoot down several attack helicopters. “We went to demonstrate and not to overthrow the government.”
But events appear to have run out of Prigozhin’s control from the start. Wagner fighters crossed into Russia without any resistance and within a couple of hours had walked into Rostov, which hosts the headquarters of the Russian Army’s southern division, virtually unmolested.
Prigozhin, a hardcore loyalist, had become the first man to capture a Russian city from the Kremlin since Chechen rebels took Grozny in the mid-1990s. He’d become an enemy of the state, whether he liked it or not.
Cue Putin’s speech on Saturday morning denouncing Prigozhin as a traitor and calling for him to be “brutally punished”. With enthusiastic heavily-armed Wagner fighters speeding north towards Moscow and the Russian army putting up limited resistance, Putin believed that Prigozhin wanted to seize power from him. And this scared Prigozhin who realised that he had pushed his luck too far.
A battle for Moscow was out of the question. He phoned the Kremlin to negotiate a way out.
Phillips O’Brien, professor of Strategic Studies at St Andrew’s University, said that Prigozhin’s stunt had simply spiralled out of control. “This was an attempt by Prigozhin to flex his muscles and protect his assets,” he said. “It got out of hand because the Putinist state is so weak.”
