Prigozhin is said to be in Russia, as Wagner mystery deepens

Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is in Russia and is a “free man” despite staging a rebellion against Moscow’s military leadership, the leader of Belarus said Thursday, deepening the mystery of where Prigozhin and his Wagner group stand and what will become of them.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko told reporters that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg, Russia, as of Thursday morning, and then “maybe he went to Moscow, maybe somewhere else, but he is not on the territory of Belarus.”

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It was Lukashenko who brokered a deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin to end the brief mutiny. He said days later that the Wagner leader had gone to Belarus, although it is not clear whether that actually happened.

Prigozhin is at liberty for now, Lukashenko said, although he conceded that he “did not know what would happen later,” and he brushed off the idea that Putin would simply have Prigozhin — until recently a vital ally — killed.

“If you think that Putin is so malicious and vindictive that he will kill Prigozhin tomorrow — no, this will not happen,” he said.

If Prigozhin — vilified as a traitor in state media — is, in fact, free and in Russia less than two weeks after staging what the Kremlin called an attempted coup, it would be one of the more perplexing twists in a story full of them. On Wednesday, a prominent current-affairs television show broadcast video of what it claimed was a police search of his opulent mansion in St. Petersburg, where it said large amounts of cash, firearms, passports, wigs and drugs had been found. A spokesperson for Prigozhin denied that the house was his.

Some Russian news outlets reported that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg on Wednesday or Thursday. A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said the Wagner leader had been in Russia for much of the time since the mutiny, but the official said it was not clear whether he had been in Belarus, in part because Prigozhin apparently uses body doubles to disguise his movements.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, deflected a question about Prigozhin’s whereabouts, saying the government had “neither the ability nor the desire” to track his movements.