The Wagner Group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is currently residing inside Belarus after he threatened a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Belarus’ leader, Alexander Lukashenko, formally welcomed him into the country on Wednesday, Lukashenko himself having taken credit for brokering the deal between Prigozhin and Putin.
What Prigozhin might do next is unknown. Belarus and Russia are close allies, and Express.co.uk was previously told that the country will essentially act as a prison for the Wagner chief.
But questions still remain over his motive to stand down so abruptly.
Emily Ferris of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) believes that Prigozhin, an oligarch, calculated that his time was up and decided to cut his losses before it was too late.
She claimed that the Wagner chief knew that his time working with Putin was over, telling Express.co.uk: “I think it was clear that Prigozhin was rather hoping for an audience with himself and he didn’t get that.
“And I wonder if it’s part of the reason why he turned around so abruptly; because he realised that his place in the system is pretty much finished and that he realised that there isn’t really a political future for him because Putin wouldn’t meet with him personally.
“I think there was there was a degree of power in Putin refusing to do that.”
Prigozhin’s Wagner troops had initially taken the southern city of Rostov-on-Don from where Russia’s military headquarters waging war on Ukraine is based.
They then advanced in what he described as a ‘March of Justice’ towards Moscow, only reaching as far as Lipetsk, around 450km away from Moscow, before turning around.
While it is known that Prigozhin is in Belarus, he has not been seen for days.
Neither has the Commander of the Russian Air Force Sergey Surovikin, who is said to have known about the Wagner mutiny in advance.
The Kremlin has remained largely silent on the episode. It has instead launched an aggressive campaign to portray Putin as the only authority figure in the country, and the only person who can successfully prevent Russia’s downfall.
Prigozhin claimed the whole thing was a protest rather than a real attempt to topple the government. In a voice message published on Monday, he said the “purpose of the march was to prevent the destruction of PMC Wagner” after Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had pushed for the group’s members to be merged into the regular Russian Armed Forces.
In doing so, Prigozhin’s lucrative business in the Ukraine war would, it is believed, essentially seize to operate.
He also said he wanted to “bring to justice those who, through their unprofessional actions, made a huge number of mistakes during the special military operation,” a term Russian top brass use to describe the war.
Putin sees the version of events differently, telling Russian security personnel in Moscow on Tuesday that they “virtually stopped a civil war” in responding to the insurrection.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Western officials believe Prigozhin had planned to capture Shoigu and top army general Valery Gerasimov, both of whom he called out in length video rants in recent months.
