Is Yevgeny Prigozhin dead? Some think it’s probably true

The story of that whole Wagner group insurrection a couple of weeks ago certainly disappeared from the headlines pretty quickly, didn’t it? The few updates we were given by the Kremlin and Russian state television kept changing. One of the biggest questions was where Yevgeny Prigozhin wound up. We were first told that he had been pardoned and was going to be staying in Belarus. But then we were told he had returned to Russia. We next heard he’d never actually gone to Belarus, but he’d had a meeting with Putin to sort things out. The one thing we do know is that nobody has managed to get him on camera in a while. That’s simply suspicious, and Retired Gen. Robert Abrams, a former senior U.S. military leader, has a different theory. He believes that Prigozhin never left the country, the meeting with Putin probably never happened, and the former Wagner boss is either locked up in a Gulag or, probably more likely dead, and we’ll never see him again. (NY Post)

Mutinous Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is likely either dead or jailed, and his much-publicized meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after his botched rebellion was probably faked, according to a former senior US military leader.

Retired Gen. Robert Abrams, an ABC News contributor who previously served as the commander of US Forces Korea, shared his thoughts on Prigozhin’s uncertain fate in the aftermath of the Wagner Group’s short-lived armed insurrection last month.

“My personal assessment is that I doubt we’ll see Prigozhin ever again publicly,” Abramstold ABC News. “I think he’ll either be put in hiding, or sent to prison, or dealt with some other way, but I doubt we’ll ever see him again.”

In the quoted section above, Abrams starts out with theories that all have Prigozhin alive, but “disappeared.” He is then asked if he believes that Prigozhin is still alive. “I don’t think he is,” he responds. “And if he is, he’s in a prison somewhere.”

Of course, people were suspecting this from the day that Prigozhin called off his march on Moscow. It was immediately suggested that he probably shouldn’t make a habit of standing near any high windows for a while, given the nasty epidemic of defenestrations that mysteriously afflicted others who had previously earned Mad Vlad’s ire. Actually, a long stay in a Siberian work camp might have been the best outcome he could have hoped for.

Arguing against that theory are reports that one of Prigozhin’s private jets made multiple trips between Russia and Belarus in the week following the uprising. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was onboard. It could have been some of his aides. He also supposedly released an audio recording a week ago, but the authenticity of that couldn’t be confirmed either. Generally he has preferred to release videos in the past.

Prigozhin’s “rebellion” or whatever it was never made any sense from the beginning and it still doesn’t. He kept insisting that he had no interest in overthrowing Putin (despite saying in one video that “we will have a new president soon”) and that he only wanted to remove the Defense Minister. And then he simply stopped in the middle of what appeared to be a very successful march toward the capital where he was greeted warmly by Russian residents along the way. What was the actual point of the entire exercise?

One thing we know for sure is that he humiliated Vladimir Putin on the world stage. He made the boss look ineffectual and probably cowardly, particularly after rumors surfaced that Putin had fled Moscow as Prigozhin approached. (We still don’t know what happened there.) Making Vladimir Putin look bad has never proven to be good for anyone’s long-term health.

In any event, we’ll either find out at some point or we won’t. Many things go down the memory hole in Russia and they’re not exactly forthcoming with the foreign press. For now, Yevgeny Prigozhin has gone from being the billionaire head of a premier military mercenary force to a missing person file in a remarkably short period of time.