Video from Prigozhin: Greetings from Belarus

Et is twilight, the picture shakes and becomes blurred again and again. One can only guess that the men who have lined up in a large circle under tall trees are wearing uniforms. A man in jeans and a black jacket steps into their midst and calls out: “Greetings, boys!”. They answer in unison: “Greetings!”. The man congratulates them on their “arrival on Belarusian soil”. These are the first moving images of Yevgeny Prigozhin to be released since the June 24 armed uprising by his mercenary troupe Wagner. The video was probably taken in a military camp near the small town of Osipowitschi, about a hundred kilometers southeast of the Belarusian capital Minsk, and was published on several Telegram channels linked to Wagner on Thursday.

“We fought with dignity. You’ve done a lot for Russia,” Prigoshin calls out to the men – and proceeds to attack the Russian military: “What’s happening at the front is a disgrace that we don’t have to take part in.” Now it’s necessary , “to wait for the moment when we can prove ourselves with the full program”. That is why “the decision was made that we will stay here in Belarus for some time”. Prigozhin makes no mention of the fact that the retreat to Belarus was part of the deal that ended his insurgency and gave him and his people impunity. “During this time, we will make it the second-best army in the world,” says Prigozhin – that too is a dig at the leadership of the Russian military, which until the defeats in Ukraine was considered the second-strongest armed force in the world after the American one. The Belarusian military announced last week that Wagner fighters had started training Belarusian soldiers.

New information about the fallen

Until the video, Prigozhin’s only word after the failure of the revolt was an audio file he posted on Telegram on June 26. In it he justified the riot, blamed it on the Russian military and berated its leadership as scheming and incompetent. Since then it was unclear where Prigozhin was. There was only one supposedly recent photo of him that appeared on Telegram last week from unclear sources. It showed him sitting in his underwear on a camp bed inside a tent and waving at the camera. While the image inspired countless jokes from Ukrainians on social media, Russian war bloggers puzzled over its meaning: was it intended to ridicule Prigozhin? Pictures from his luxurious St. Petersburg estate had previously been circulated, apparently with the aim of destroying Prigozhin’s self-created image as a fighter against a corrupt and well-fed elite. Or did Prigozhin want to counteract these attempts to discredit him with a picture of a simple soldier’s barracks?

The opposition Belarusian telegram channel Belaruski Hayun has registered several flights of a Prigozhin-owned aircraft between Minsk and Petersburg since the end of June. The Petersburg news portal Fontanka.ru reported that Prigozhin was seen in the city in early July. The Belarusian ruler Alexandr Lukashenko made several statements: a few days after the riot he confirmed that Prigozhin had arrived in Belarus, then he reported that Prigozhin was regulating his affairs in Russia. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, repeatedly claimed that the Kremlin knew nothing about Prigozhin’s whereabouts, until he surprisingly confirmed on July 10 that Putin and Prigozhin had indeed spoken to each other in the Kremlin five days after the revolt.