It poses a stark contrast to how the Kremlin has treated those staging anti-government protests.
Russian authorities said Tuesday they have closed a criminal investigation into the aborted armed rebellion led by mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and are pressing no charges against him or his troops.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, said its investigation found that those involved in the mutiny, which lasted less than 24 hours after Prigozhin declared it Friday, “ceased activities directed at committing the crime,” so the case would not be pursued.
It was the latest twist in a series of stunning events that have brought the gravest threat so far to President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power amid the 16-month-old war in Ukraine.
Over the weekend, the Kremlin pledged not to prosecute Prigozhin and his fighters after he stopped the revolt on Saturday, even though Putin had branded them as traitors and authorities rushed to fortify Moscow’s defenses as the mutineers approached the capital.
The charge of mounting an armed mutiny is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prigozhin escaping prosecution poses a stark contrast to how the Kremlin has treated those staging anti-government protests in Russia, where many opposition figures have gotten long sentences in notoriously harsh penal colonies.
The whereabouts of Prigozhin remained a mystery Tuesday. The Kremlin has said he would be exiled to neighboring Belarus, but neither he nor the Belarusian authorities have confirmed that.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had no information on the the 62-year-old head of the Wagner private military contractor.
An independent Belarusian military monitoring project Belaruski Hajun said a business jet that Prigozhin reportedly uses landed near Minsk on Tuesday morning. The media team for Prigozhin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally who brokered a deal with Prigozhin to stop the uprising, didn’t immediately address Prigozhin’s fate in a speech Tuesday.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron hand for 29 years, relentlessly stifling dissent and relying on Russian subsidies and political support, portrayed the uprising as the latest development in a clash between Prigozhin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Their long-simmering personal feud has at times boiled over, and Prigozhin has said the revolt aimed to unseat Shoigu, not Putin.
Lukashenko framed the insurrection as a significant threat, saying he put Belarus’ armed forces on a combat footing as the mutiny unfolded.
Like Putin, he couched the Ukraine war in terms of an existential threat to Russia, saying: “If Russia collapses, we all will perish under the debris.
