American Military News July 01, 2023 Bloomberg News - TNS
President Vladimir Putin sought to cast the Wagner leader who rose against him as corrupt, even as he said the Kremlin was financing the mercenary’s operations.
As Yevgeny Prigozhin arrived in Belarus in his private jet from St. Petersburg on Tuesday, Putin was detailing more than $3 billion he said Russia had paid from the state budget in the past year for Wagner’s troops and for food supplied by Prigozhin’s Concord catering company for the Russian army fighting in Ukraine.
“I hope that no one stole anything, or, let’s say, stole just a little, in the course of this work,” Putin told a group of soldiers at the Kremlin. “We will of course look into all this.”
The portrait of Prigozhin as a grasping traitor was an effort to undercut the Wagner leader’s claims to popular sympathy as his troops raced through southern Russia to within 200 kilometers (124 miles) of Moscow before aborting the rebellion after a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Under the agreement, Putin pledged not to prosecute Wagner for armed mutiny and investigators closed a criminal case Tuesday.
That doesn’t mean prosecutors can’t open embezzlement and corruption cases, according to Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Ordinary Russian citizens, for the most part, love defenders of the motherland, and don’t like sly businessmen,” he said on Telegram.
The implication was that Prigozhin had revolted ahead of a July 1 deadline for Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry, effectively ending its independence and the flow of state cash to his mercenary group in the war.
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2023/07/putin-steps-up-effort-to-undercut-wagner-leader-after-revolt/