On the day of Prigozhin’s rebellion, Putin was in St. Petersburg on Kovalchuk’s yacht

President of Russia Vladimir Putin was in St. Petersburg on the evening of June 24 – the day of the rebellion of PMC “Wagner” and Evneniya Prigozhin – at the festival of graduates “Alye parusa”. This is confirmed by journalist Mikhail Zygar in a column published in The New York Times. The author of the book “The Whole Kremlin War” based on insiders from the Russian ruling circles refers to sources close to Putin’s entourage and claims that during the holiday, Putin was on the yacht of his businessman friend Yury Kovalchuk in the Neva.

“Nothing, not even an armed uprising, would keep him from his favorite party,” writes Zygar. According to him, Putin never misses private parties that take place on the day of the “Scarlet Sails” – a popular St. Petersburg holiday during which a sailing ship sails along the Neva under scarlet sails.

The June 24 holiday began after it became known that Yevgeny Prigozhin refused to continue the armed campaign against Moscow. However, Putin obviously had to arrive in St. Petersburg even before the riot ended. Zygar’s sources consider his arrival in St. Petersburg “the clearest evidence that the president is detached from reality.”

While mass events, including school graduations, were canceled in Moscow on the day of the uprising, and a regime of counter-terrorist operations was introduced, such measures were not applied in St. Petersburg, and the “Scarlet Sails” festival went ahead as planned.

Kremlin representative Dmitry Peskov on the same day denied that Putin had left Moscow and gone on the “Scarlet Sails”. In previous years, the Kremlin neither confirmed nor denied Putin’s participation in the holiday. As noted by “Agency”, in 2022 “Rotonda” reported with reference to sources that Putin could watch “Alye Parusa” from the water together with Alexander Lukashenko, and in 2021 “Novaya Gazeta” also wrote that Putin was present at the holiday.

As Zygar writes, Putin believes that the rebellion did not change the political situation in any way, but many of the journalist’s interlocutors believe that this is not the case, and that Putin’s system of government is under threat.

On June 24, a number of mass media reported that two planes of the “Russia” air force, which Vladimir Putin uses, took off from Moscow in the direction of the Tver region and turned off the transponders. They could fly either to the Khotylovo airfield, located not far from Putin’s residence on Valdae, or to St. Petersburg. After the end of Prigozhin’s rebellion, the planes returned to Moscow. There is no evidence that Putin was on board one of the planes.

The armed demonstration of the PMC “Wagner” ended with the agreement to close the criminal case on the fact of the rebellion and that Yevgeny Prigozhin and willing mercenaries of the PMC will go to Belarus. Many details related to the rebellion are still unclear. Prigozhin himself claims that the goal of the speech was not to overthrow Putin.