Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow caused panic and led Vladimir Putin to go on the airways to condemn the head of Wagner. He decried the ‘treachery’ and vowed to ‘liquidate’ what remained of Wagner – and many assumed Prigozhin himself.
In the days that followed, something more subtle happened. As our correspondent Pjotr Sauer tells Nosheen Iqbal, while Russian state TV has called Prigozhin corrupt and traitorous, it emerged that he had been invited for a face-to-face meeting with the Russian president.
Meanwhile, in Africa, where Wagner has a large and growing presence, Jason Burke reports that the message being sent to regimes that rely on it is a clear one: it’s business as usual.
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