Moscow (EFE)
“During the investigation of the criminal case (…) on armed rebellion, it was established that on June 24 its participants ceased the actions directly aimed at committing this crime,” the FSB said in a statement cited by the official TASS agency.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened the case under Article 279 of the Russian Criminal Code on Friday night, when Prigozhin and his men announced that they had crossed from Ukraine into the Russian border in the southern Rostov region and had initiated a “march for justice” to Moscow after denouncing an attack by the Russian Army against a mercenary camp in the Russian rear.
When a column of mercenaries reached 200 kilometers from Moscow, the mediation of the Belarusian president, Alexandr Lukashenko, managed to stop the rebellion.
Prigozhin would already be in Belarus
The agreement reached with Prigozhin consisted – among other points – of sending the businessman into exile in Belarus in exchange for annulling his prosecution.
This Tuesday, the private plane of the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, landed at the Machulishchi military airfield near Minsk, according to the Gayun research group, which is dedicated to monitoring military activity in Belarusian territory.
According to data from the Flightradar24 flight tracking page, the device in which Prigozhin was traveling landed at 07:37 local time (04:37 GMT),
It is an Embraer Legacy 600 aircraft with registration number RA-02795, which had been included by the United States in 2019 on the sanctions list, due to its connection to the Wagner leader.
According to Gayun, another private plane with the number RA-02878 took off from St. Petersburg and landed at 07:58 local time, also at the Machulishchi military airfield.
Whereabouts unknown since Saturday
It is unknown for now if Prigozhin was on board one of these planes after reaching an agreement with the Kremlin on Saturday to go into exile in Belarus and not be criminally prosecuted in exchange for stopping the uprising.
Wagner’s boss was last seen in public on the night of the 24th when he left the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in a vehicle, which his mercenaries had taken to begin a column march from there to Moscow.
On Monday, without revealing his whereabouts, he posted an audio message on his Telegram channel to ensure that with the armed rebellion he did not want to overthrow the Government, but rather to protest the intentions of the Ministry of Defense to dismantle his private military company by forcing it to subordinate itself. to the military institution.
According to the Russian investigative portal “Important Stories”, Prigozhin flew after the Rostov-on-Don riot to Saint Petersburg, from where he made other flights on Sunday to return to Russia’s former imperial capital in the afternoon.
The President of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko, will make statements on Tuesday about his role as mediator in the Russian crisis, which represents the biggest challenge for Russian President Vladimir Putin in 23 years of power.