The Wagner Group leader may be headed for Belarus, but his mercenaries’ aborted march on Moscow has undermined the Russian president’s authority.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the oftentimes vocal leader of the Wagner mercenary group, may be headed for a life of exile in Belarus after an aborted advance on Moscow, but Saturday’s mutiny against the Russian military has rattled the authority of Vladimir Putin, experts have said.
In a matter of hours, Wagner Group units were able to capture military sites in Rostov-on-Don in Russia before advancing north towards the Russian capital, prompting the nation’s military to hastily prepare defensive measures.
Following a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, one of the Russian president’s few allies over the war in Ukraine, Prigozhin agreed to leave Russia and order his men to return to their bases in Ukraine in exchange for not facing criminal charges over the short-lived rebellion.
«Understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps, according to the plan,» Prigozhin said in a voice memo posted to his Telegram account.
Even though the situation, for the moment, appears to have been diffused, it is the first time Putin has been directly challenged over Russian military failures in Ukraine, by what is seen by some as its most effective fighting force in the war.
Prigozhin’s men were attributed with being largely responsible for the capture of Bakhmut—one of the few major Russian territorial gains—and the mercenary oligarch has become increasingly critical of Russia’s military leadership in recent months.
