The head of Wagner’s mercenary group, Evgeny Prigozhin, is allegedly in Moscow, and on July 1 he even met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, according to Western intelligence services, quoted by the French publication Liberation in its Monday issue. , adopted by Agerpres.

Since June 24, since he ordered his units approaching Moscow to turn off the road, the boss of the Wagner group has disappeared from the landscape. According to Liberation’s exclusive sources, he would have spent the week after the mutiny in the Kremlin negotiating the fate of his empire.

Therefore, according to them, Prigozhin will not be in Minsk or in St. Petersburg, as previously announced. At least since July 1, Prigozhin has been in custody in the Kremlin, where he was summoned together with the command.

In the Kremlin, Yevgeny Prigozhin was supposed to meet with President Vladimir Putin, and he would also have a meeting with Viktor Zolotov, the commander of the Russian National Guard and one of the most loyal associates of the Russian head of state for this position. .

For years, Zolotov worked as Putin’s bodyguard, as well as with Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FSS).

Peskov pretended not to know

On Thursday, July 6, when asked about Prigozhin’s fate and whereabouts, Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov offered no clues, saying only that Moscow had “neither the ability nor the desire” to monitor his hypothetical movements.

Earlier in the day, Belarusian President Oleksandr Lukashenko, who officially mediated between the rebel mercenary leader and Putin during the failed coup, said Prigozhin was not on Belarusian soil. And there would be no Wagner mercenaries in Belarus either, they are in their camps in Luhansk (eastern Ukraine). On June 27, Lukashenko announced that Wagner’s boss was in Belarus.

The attempted uprising of leader Wagner on June 23-24 shook the Russian authorities in the midst of the armed conflict in Ukraine. Within a few hours, mercenary units occupied the headquarters of the Russian army in Rostov (southwest) and began moving towards Moscow, reports AFP.

The uprising ended on the evening of June 24 with an agreement to send Prigozhin into exile in Belarus, he assured that his campaign was not aimed at overthrowing the government or the Russian authorities, but at saving Wagner’s group from being dissolved by the General Staff.

Since then, Russian state media have tried to portray him as a greedy businessman who lost his mind, making his fortune after years of lucrative contracts with the Russian state, and President Vladimir Putin Putin himself said that Wagner’s mercenary group was financed from the state budget after a long period in which The Kremlin denied any connection with Wagner, the quoted press agency reported.