Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who mounted a failed mutiny against the Russian leadership last month, has been shown wearing a series of bizarre wigs in photographs released by the Russian security services to pro-Kremlin Telegram channels.
Some footage was also released to state TV after the FSB raided Prigozhin’s palace in St Petersburg.
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The fake beards and wigs were reportedly used as disguises by Prigozhin while in the field in Africa and the Middle East. Wagner, a shadowy mercenary group, operates in countries from Mali to Syria.
According to Rossiya-1, a pro-Kremlin media outlet which follows government messaging, agents also discovered fake passports, gold bars, a medical treatment room, guns and ammunition, a sledgehammer – a key symbol of the Wagner group – as well as a stuffed alligator, and a framed photograph that appears to show a group of severed heads.
The freshly released photographs can be read as an attempt to humiliate Prigozhin, who came within 120 miles (200 kilometres) of Moscow during a mutiny against Russian military leadership. Chunks of highway were torn up and bridges were destroyed in a bid to slow down Prigozhin’s march on the Russian capital – the event was humiliating for Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made him look his weakest in his 23-year rule.
Prigozhin insisted that what he termed his “march for justice” was not a coup but a protest. He called off the mutiny in exchange for not being charged and for going into exile in Belarus, a neighbouring state with strong ties to the Kremlin.
However, another twist in the story emerged on Thursday, when the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, said that Prigozhin wasn’t in Belarus.
“With regards [to] Yevgeny Prigozhin, he is in St Petersburg,” he said. “Where is he this morning? Maybe this morning he went to Moscow.” He added that Prigozhin was free to move around the Russian Federation and that his life was not at risk.
One of the presenters of “60 Minutes,” the programme on Rossiya-1 that released footage of the raid, described Prigozhin as a “traitor.”
“A normal person can’t have so many passports,” said Eduard Petrov. “Why did this person have such strange powers, like the serious leader of some kind of criminal group?”
