WHO REALLY ENDED THE WAGNER MUTINY?

June 26, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Personally, I do not enjoy watching the world’s news and other media forms stuck on the basic facts of the Wagnerite march towards Moscow as though they were in a cud-chewing contest. I’ve covered the exploit since it began, and have gone deep into the Russo-Ukraine war since the day that started and have done my best to keep the public informed of the details as well as the historic cyclical analogies and expectancies. Since this has had no effect on other journalists to speak of, I’ll just tidy things up with one last volley of information.

On June 23, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, claiming to be fed up with the antics of his rivals in the official Russian military, dashed out of Ukraine and led his private army of zeks 60 miles into Russia, into Rostov-on-Don, where he crashed one of his tanks and visited regular officers in the command center for all the joint Russian forces fighting in southeast Ukraine. He cozened the residents, allowed them to take selfies with him, then rode off towards Moscow on “a march for justice” to their dying cheers.

Meanwhile, outside of Prigozhin’s office in St. Petersburg, the FSB -another of Wagner’s rival organizations- were loading vans and buses with boxes they’d removed from the Trezzini Hotel, where Prigozhin maintained a luxurious base. Those boxes contained tens of millions of rubles visible to passersby as the FSB and some Special Forces struggled to close, then tape, the cartons. The haul, when inventoried, amounted to some 4 billion rubles ($47 million) in cash. The visit also netted five kilograms of gold bars, six pistols and “five briquettes of white powder, one kilogram each,” and four passports with a photograph of a person similar to Yevgeny Prigozhin, but with different names.

The information on the expropriation comes not just from the Russian Fontanks news agency, but also from Prigozhin himself, who commenced an indignant tirade about it on his own Concord Group Telegram channel. Throughout the exchange, strong implications arose (A) that another half-dozen or so such hideaways could be readily found in the St. Petersburg area alone, and (B) that Russia had already, or would, viciously misuse families of Wagner soldiers living in Russia.

Lastly: Although it was trumpeted by TASS that Belarusian President Lukashenko had mediated the end to the Wagner mutiny, it was easily extrapolated that he’d done so on Putin’s orders. See https://derkoolschrank.com/the-crackup/ In point of fact, the entire stand-down was negotiated by the Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Office Anton Vaino, and the Russian Ambassador to Belarus Boris Gryzlov.

Update: June 27, 2023: Today, in a recorded address to the military, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was fully financed by the state, He specified that Prigozhin received over 86 billion rubles ($1 billion) from the state’s budget between May 2022 and May 2023. Putin chuckled: “I hope that nobody stole anything, or at least did not steal much, but we will deal with that.” Conveniently, Prigozhin has always claimed that he paid everything in cash.