A month on from the Wagner Group’s extraordinary attempted mutiny against Russia’s military establishment – which saw its fighters leave their posts in eastern Ukraine, occupy the city of Rostov-on-Don and march on Moscow before a last minute peace deal was agreed – the mercenary group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, appears to be back in his homeland.
Under the terms of the truce brokered between Mr Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin by Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko on 24 June, the former was said to have agreed to resettle in Belarus while his troops were ordered to report to camps in that country before either rejoining the Russian military or stepping away altogether without fear of prosecution.
It subsequently emerged that Mr Prigozhin – a former felon who emerged from prison to build up a lucrative catering business and was nicknamed “Putin’s chef” before he formed Wagner – had attended a face-to-face meeting with Mr Putin at the Kremlin five days after the aborted coup, rather than making his way to Minsk as agreed, deepening the mystery surrounding the affair.
Mr Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov revealed that a three-hour meeting had taken place on 29 June with 35 people in attendance, including Wagner unit commanders, who had reiterated their loyalty to their leader.
This month he has also been seen in videos apparently filmed on Belarusian soil, where some of Wagner’s fighters are training some of the country’s troops.
Now, Mr Prigozhin has appeared in a picture posted to Facebook by Wagner associate Dimitri Sytyi in which he is dressed casually and posing with an ambassador identified by the BBC as Freddy Mapouka, a dignitary from the Central African Republic, at the Trezzini Palace Hotel in St Petersburg, apparently on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa Summit.
A second image shows him shaking hands with another man in front of a large map of the African continent.
The mercenary leader keeps an office at the hotel, according to local media cited CNN, and it was one of several locations raided by Russian law enforcement on 6 July in the aftermath of the rebellion.
Mr Prigozhin has reportedly been seen in public only once since that date, appearing on a video posted online on 19 July in which he greeted Wagner fighters ostensibly arriving at Asipovichy military base in Belarus.
Wagner has ties to the Central African Republic, its soldiers of fortune having carried out operations in the diamond-rich nation as well as in Mozambique, Sudan, Syria and Libya since the group’s formation in 2014 in response to the outbreak of separatist fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine following the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Since Mr Putin’s invasion of Russia’s western neighbour on 24 February 2022, Wagner’s men had been caught up in intense fighting in southern Ukraine, particularly the battles for Bakhmut and Soledar, with Mr Prigozhin cutting an increasingly belligerent and dissatisfied figure, frequently taking to Telegram to post angry videos berating Russian defence secretary Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov for leaving his troops without adequate supplies.
In one video posted a month before the mutiny, Mr Prigozhin posed next to a heap of Wagner corpses and lambasted Mr Shoigu and Mr Gerasmov, telling them: “The blood is still fresh. They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.
“These are someone’s fathers and someone’s sons. The scum that doesn’t give us ammunition will eat their guts in hell.”
Despite his astonishing recent actions, Mr Prigozhin’s apparent reappearance in Russia suggests he has not yet been entirely ostracised.
