Except for two cryptic audio messages posted on related Telegram channels, little concrete has been known about the fate of Yevgeny Prigozhin since he took up arms against Vladimir Putin's Kremlin two weeks ago with a rebellion that, although it lasted only 24 hours, made Russia tremble. The chief of the Wagner mercenaries was a ghost before the conflict in Ukraine, and now he is again.
The aborted coup adventure was the first chapter of the swan song of this St. Petersburg businessman who built a small empire with logistics, media, film, mining and catering businesses, for which he received the nickname "Putin's cook." ”. The mutiny of his private army, which came to control the important city of Rostov-on-Don and intended to reach Moscow, ended with an agreement. Putin agreed not to prosecute him or his men in exchange for living in Belarus from now on, an exile offered by the leader of this country, Alexander Lukashenko.
In the days that followed, Putin and the Russian political elite busied themselves with regaining any possible lost authority, being seen in public more than usual and participating in events in uniform. "If in 1917 and 1991 people like Putin had been at the head of the state, there would not have been a revolution or the disintegration of the Soviet Union," the president of the Duma, Viacheslav Volodin, a firm ally of the head of the Kremlin, wrote on Telegram.
The second chapter runs parallel, but it's not over yet. After Putin accused Prigozhin of treason, on June 24 FSB agents searched his offices and companies. On the last day of June, the media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the websites of the media holding Patriot Media, owned by Prigozhin. The Ría Fan agency, Politics Today, Economy Today, Neva News and People's News stopped working in Russia.
The director of Ría Fan, Yevgueni Zúbarev, announced on July 1 the closure of the group. He assured that his employees had protected both Prigozhin and Putin "from the attacks of the anti-Kremlin opposition", and expressly cited the politician Alexei Navalni, who is serving a long prison sentence today.
Patriot Media took a strongly nationalist and pro-Kremlin line, while offering positive coverage of the news about the Wagner Group. It also served his boss to attack his opponents, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Saint Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov.
Zubarev gave no further explanation. No need for him to do it. The same day, some workers removed the Wagner Group logo from its headquarters. "Putin's cook" was falling out of favor.
The Russian press has also given this week for the dismantlement of the Internet Research Agency, better known as the "troll factory", which for a decade has dedicated itself to sowing disinformation on social networks, even interfering in the presidential elections of the United States. United in 2016, as Prigozhin himself first acknowledged in January. "I invented it (...) to protect the Russian information space from rude and aggressive anti-Russian propaganda coming from the West," he said after years of denial.
When Wagner's mercenaries began advancing menacingly toward Moscow on June 24, Putin accused their leader of being a "traitor." But at no time did he refer to him by his first name or his last name. Since then his name has been blurred and his future remains uncertain. Russia will try to maintain the Wagner Group's business abroad and its influence in Africa, but by eliminating the role of its leader. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reacted quickly to assure his African allies that Wagner's fighters will not withdraw.
Prigozhin has stopped being mentioned for good, and if he comes out now, everything indicates that it is with the intention of discrediting him.
According to the Fontanka.ru media, the Russian authorities returned to the businessman 10,000 million rubles (one hundred million euros) that the police had seized in the registry of his properties on the day of the riot. This Wednesday, however, the state channel Rossiya 1 broadcast images of the search of the Prigozhin mansion. Huge and decorated in a tasteless kitsch style, the broadcast focuses on the discovery of wads of money in rubles and dollars, several passports with different names, photos with severed heads, an indoor swimming pool and a collection of wigs with which the businessman was photographed and whose use is left to the viewer's imagination.
Before Putin launched his current military campaign against Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin was a ghost who lived between his legal businesses and his unspeakable affairs. Now it is not known with certainty where he is. Lukashenko said on June 27 that he had already arrived in Belarus, apparently forced exile, and a Telegram channel close to Wagner, Gray Zone, assured on Monday that "part of his units" were already training there. On Thursday, by contrast, Lukashenko claimed that Prigozhin had returned to Russia and that his men were still in their permanent headquarters in eastern Ukraine. He goes back to being a ghost, but his chains keep rattling.
