They have three adult children, two daughters, Polina and Veronika, and a son, Pavel. He is married to Lyubov Prigozhina, a pharmacist-turned-businesswoman who owns a string of successful spas in Saint Petersburg. It is not known if Prigozhin’s family will join him. African operations will probably continue, though, but at whose behest? Moscow’s? Minsk’s?” “I can’t see them taking part in the war effort in Ukraine. “It will be interesting to see if Wagner is redeployed to Belarus,” says Radchenko.
#Comment icon mockflow how to#
This is a sort of consultancy service for autocrats that offers a suite of services from how to influence elections, to bodyguards and bloodthirsty mercenary fighters.
Sergey Radchenko, a British historian, said that the hyperactive Prigozhin may already be planning to run Wagner’s lucrative Africa operations from Minsk. Its ranks are filled with former Russian soldiers, convicted rapists and murderers. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group has been called a “transnational criminal organisation” by the US government. This is an alarming prospect for Belarus’s EU neighbours. Lukashenko, a man renowned for his vanity, appears to enjoy the limelight that his high-profile guests bring and he has already said that he is looking forward to “learning” about Wagner’s experience in Ukraine.
In 2019, Lukashenko even gave Bakiyev a painting of nomads and a knife for his 70th birthday. Bakiyev has been photographed alongside Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko inspecting expansion plans for Minsk. Nobody yet knows how Prigozhin will live in Minsk but if Bakiyev’s experience is anything to go by, he should be relatively free. He will have 73-year-old Kurmanbek Bakiyev, a reportedly corrupt former president of ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who was overthrown in a revolution in 2010, for company. Prigozhin will not be the only exile living in Minsk, constantly looking over his shoulder for assassins.
#Comment icon mockflow windows#
“The usual jokes about windows and cups of tea apply here,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst, in a reference to the large number of Putin’s enemies who fall from buildings or are poisoned, Alexander Litvinenko among them. Now he is cast out, with the grim knowledge of what Putin does to traitors. He is accused of manipulating the 2016 US presidential election with “troll factories” and has clearly relished commanding Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East. It will be painful for Prigozhin, a man who thrives on knowing he has influence and can act as the playmaker. Under the agreed peace deal that ended his rebellion, Prigozhin now faces a potentially frustrating, nerve-jangling life in exile in Minsk, a staid city that can’t compete with Moscow or St Petersburg for nightlife and drama, or, for that matter, with Ukraine’s battlefields for derring-do and camaraderie. So what does this formerly influential military chief’s life look like now and how did his relationship with the Russian leader unravel on such a dramatic scale? Prigozhin, having previously been Putin’s right-hand man, has alienated himself with his coup and become a security risk. It’s caused alarm in Baltic states, as Latvia and Lithuania have called for Nato to strengthen its eastern borders in case they become targets as this suspected war criminal takes shelter nearby. His private jet left Rostov, the Russian city of one million people that he captured on Saturday, and landed in Belarus – and Russia’s intelligence services said that they had dropped a criminal case against him. The dust has barely settled since the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin shook the world with his rebellion in Russia on Friday – but he is already reportedly starting his new life in exile in Minsk.
0 kommentar(er)
