Leaked pictures for Prigozhin in a tent rise the speculation of the new Wagner group base in Belarus
Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared, in leaked photos, on Friday, sitting on a bed, in underwear, in what appears to be a tent, nearly a month after the failure of his rebellion against the leadership in Moscow.
Prigozhin appeared, in the new photo, which posted on Telegram.
The floor of the tent appears to match those shown in photos taken last week during an official tour of the formerly abandoned Osipovichi camp.
Recently, a satellite images reported by Radio Free Europe and BBC showed dozens of newly erected tents and other buildings there at Osipovichi camp, southeast of the Belarusian capital Minsk.
According to reports, fighters from Wagner arrived in Belarus from Russia, as Ukrainian and Polish officials said on Saturday, only one day after Minsk said that Wagner fighters are training at the camp southeast of the capital.
“Wagner is in Belarus,” Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s border agency, said in a statement posted on Telegram.
He added that the movements of “separate groups” from Russia had been monitored in Belarus.
According to reports from the Belarusian capital, Wagner unites have been in Belarus since at least Tuesday.
On Friday, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense released a video showing what it said were Wagner fighters training Belarusian soldiers in a military area near the town of Osipovichi, about 90 km southeast of the capital, Minsk.
The Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Wagner rebellion, in which fighters seized a major military headquarters in southern Russia and then marched on Moscow, could have pushed Russia into civil war.
Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin hasn’t been seen in public since leaving the southern Russian city of Rostov late on June 24, despite a private plane linked to him between Belarus, Moscow and St Petersburg.
Deputy Minister for the Coordinator of Special Services in Poland, Stanislav Zarin, said that Warsaw also had confirmations of the presence of Wagner fighters in Belarus.
“There could be several hundred of them at the moment,” he wrote on Twitter.
Poland said earlier this month that it was strengthening its borders with Belarus to face any potential threats.
