Mutinous Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is likely either dead or jailed, and his much-publicized meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after his botched rebellion was probably faked, according to a former senior US military leader.
According to The New York Post, retired Gen. Robert Abrams, an ABC News contributor who previously served as the commander of US Forces Korea, Prigozhin is likely dead or in prison.
“My personal assessment is that I doubt we’ll see Prigozhin ever again publicly,” Abrams told ABC News. “I think he’ll either be put in hiding, or sent to prison, or dealt with some other way, but I doubt we’ll ever see him again.”
Asked if he thought the billionaire businessman was alive after posing the most significant challenge to Putin’s regime since he came to power in 1999, Abrams said: “I personally don’t think he is, and if he is, he’s in a prison somewhere.”
Most headlines say he is a dead man walking if he is alive.
By July 5th, after Prigozhin’s failed coup, such as it was, the Russian government quickly began to dismantle his empire, reports the Guardian. The government first went after his avenues of communication. In a dictatorship, everyone lives by the grace of the dictator.
They started to absorb Prigozhin’s most notorious online outfit, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a troll factory loosely linked to the Patriot group best known for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election. The troll farms and news outlets that supported him turned against him. At least one outlet was shuttered.
His companies supplying the military were losing contracts.
Observers have suggested that some of Prigozhin’s international operations in Africa were too useful to Moscow to be dismantled, with the Kremlin likely eager to take control of Prigozhin’s lucrative mining contracts in the Central African Republic.
Last week, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, quickly moved to reassure allies in Africa that thousands of Wagner group fighters deployed to the continent would not be withdrawn.
The Russian Federation has all the bases covered.
Meanwhile, according to some reports, Prigozhin went to St. Petersburg to pick up $4 billion of his confiscated money. Business Insider said he was spotted in St. Petersburg on July 4th. There are no photos.
Two sources, National News and CNN, said he was last seen at his headquarters on Rostov-on-don on June 24th. Allegedly, he went to Belarus on June 27th, but Belarus’s president said he was not there and had returned to Russia.
The Kremlin said Prigozhin and Putin met on June 29 and that Prigozhin pledged his loyalty to the Russian leader.
Did he really make it out of that meeting on June 29th? You’d have to believe in Putin the Benevolent to follow that line of reasoning.
There are no photos of him. His plane has gone back and forth a few times. Allegedly, he is still posting on his Telegram channel. Someone is.
