Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin five days after his mercenary fighters set their sights upon Moscow, the Kremlin has claimed.
The Russian president’s office said Mr Prigozhin met Mr Putin for three hours on June 29 following the failed rebellion.
Mr Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on July 10 that Mr Putin invited Mr Prigozhin and 34 other senior Wagner commanders to their headquarters. This was to discuss a deal to stop the military coup from rearing its head again.
He said Mr Prigozhin had travelled to Russia at least once since the deal was brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to stop the rebel attack in exchange for safe passage to exile in Belarus.
Mr Peskov said Mr Prigozhin assured Mr Putin that his Wagner troops were loyal to Russia and him.
But where is the Wagner Group leader at the time of writing?
Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Mr Prigozhin, 62, is a Russian oligarch who has been fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine. He was born in Europe’s fourth-most populous city St Petersburg.
Formerly imprisoned in the Soviet Union for stealing, Mr Prigozhin oversees a network of powerful businesses, including the state-backed mercenary firm the Wagner Group. He is also reportedly in charge of three businesses suspected of interfering with the 2016 and 2018 US elections.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, Mr Prigozhin became involved in grocery store, gambling and restaurant businesses.
In the 2000s, Mr Prigozhin became close to Mr Putin. By 2003, he had split with his business partners and opened his own, stand-alone eateries.
Concord Catering, one of Mr Prigozhin's businesses, secured significant government contracts. He obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to feed government employees and students. Since Mr Prigozhin owns eateries and caterers that work for the Kremlin, he is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s chef”.
Mr Prigozhin established the Internet Research Agency, a bot farm that meddled in the 2016 US presidential election by spreading misinformation on social media.
Although it is still unclear if it affected the election's outcome, the US intelligence community sanctioned Mr Prigozhin. He admitted in 2022 that he had meddled in US elections and would do so again.
Where is Yevgeny Prigozhin now?
It is not known where the Wagner chief is currently, though last Thursday Lukashenko claimed that Prigozhin was back in Russia along with thousands of the group’s fighters.
The Belarusian president told reporters: “He is in Petersburg ... perhaps he went to Moscow this morning.”
How did Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group involvement begin?
After years of denying his involvement with Wagner, Mr Prigozhin acknowledged he was the founder of the group on September 26, 2022.
He claimed to have started it in May 2014 to aid the Russian military fighting in Donbas. This revelation was in response to a widely shared film in which Mr Prigozhin was shown infiltrating a Mari El (a Russian republic) jail and enticing detainees by offering them freedom if they worked for the Wagner Group for six months.
He claimed to have 50,000 men available to him "in the best times," with roughly 35,000 of them always on the front lines.
He did not specify if these figures included prisoners, but it is known that he visited Russian jails to find fighters, offering them pardons in exchange for surviving a six-month stint serving alongside Wagner.
In the days and weeks following Russia's takeover of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in April 2014, Wagner was first observed in action in eastern Ukraine. This was shortly after a separatist conflict there broke out.
Mr Prigozhin has reportedly benefitted financially from Wagner's deployment to Africa and Syria. Using its access to gold and other resources in Africa, the business is funding operations in Ukraine, according to US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's statement in January.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s problematic relationship with Vladimir Putin
Mr Prigozhin has presented Mr Putin with a conundrum recently by openly criticising Russia's military authorities.
In one particularly gruesome video from the beginning of May, Mr Prigozhin stood next to a pile of dead Wagner fighters and pointed a gun directly at two army officers. Gesturing towards the bodies behind him, he said: "The blood is still fresh. They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.”
When Mr Prigozhin launched a fresh rant against the Russian military on June 23 and then led his men into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, he ignited a full-scale uprising against the Kremlin.
Mr Putin reacted to Mr Prigozhin’s actions by saying “it is a stab in the back of our country and our people” in an address to the nation on June 24.
