Plane belonging Russian mercenary chief lands in Belarus, flight-tracking website shows
A plane belonging to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary leader who shook President Vladimir Putin's government by leading an armed revolt on Saturday, arrived in Belarus Tuesday, according to a flight-tracking website. It was not immediately known if Prigozhin was on the flight.
Meanwhile, Russian authorities closed a criminal investigation into the armed rebellion, with no charges against Prigozhin or any of the other participants, The Associated Press reported.
The head of Wagner Group's whereabouts have been a mystery since he struck a deal with Putin's government that allegedly allowed him to go to neighboring Belarus in exchange for standing down rebel forces as they marched on Moscow.
Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed that an Embraer Legacy 600 jet with the serial number RA02795 took off from St. Petersburg shortly after 1 a.m. local time (5 p.m. ET Monday), before landing in southern Russia. It then departed from an undisclosed location in Russia and landed in Minsk, the Belarussian capital, at an unspecified time Tuesday morning.
U.S. Treasury sanctions documents from 2019 show that this plane belongs to Prigozhin, dubbed Putin’s chef, and was bought in 2018 under its previous name, M-SAAN, from a company based in the Indian Ocean nation of Seychelles. The company, Autolex, is being pursued by the U.S. government for "materially assisting" Prigozhin.
A Treasury press release warned at the time that anyone who provides landing rights or other services to the jet "run the risk of facilitating or supporting Prigozhin’s nefarious activities and may also be subject to future sanctions."
Also on Tuesday, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko underlined how seriously the Wagner rebellion had been taken in the country, saying his military had been placed in “full combat readiness” in response.
“My position is: If Russia collapses, we will remain under the rubble, we will all die,” Lukashenko, Putin’s closest ally in Europe who claimed to have helped broker the deal that ended the armed mutiny, told journalist in Minsk.
Despite earlier reports that a criminal case against Prigozhin was still open, the state-owned RIA news agency said that the case was now closed because “the participants had ceased actions directly aimed at committing the crime.”
Prigozhin's future has been a subject of much debate
The immediate future for Prigozhin has been a subject of much debate after he called off what he later called a “march of justice” as his fighters headed toward Moscow, the Russian capital, on Saturday.
By the time they retreated the rebels had already taken the major city of Rostov-on-Don and had shaken Putin's authority and sowed doubt among millions of Russians already weary from 15 months of war in Ukraine.
In a televised address Monday, Putin angrily called the rebels "traitors" who played into the hands of those who wanted to see the country "drowned in a bloody domestic strife."
Prigozhin claimed that he acted not to topple Putin’s regime but to protect Wagner from being destroyed by the Russian defense ministry.
“Experienced fighters, experienced commanders will be simply ‘smeared’ and will basically be used as meat,” he said, using Russian slang for “destroyed,” adding: “We did not have the goal of toppling the existing regime and legitimately-elected government.”
Prigozhin also repeated allegations that nearly 30 mercenaries had been killed in Ukraine when a Wagner unit was fired on by the Russian military, which served as a “trigger” for the revolt.
