on the day of the riot, the police in Moscow received 20 reports of mines in the name of PMC “Wagner”

On the day of Prigozhin’s rebellion, the police in Moscow received no less than 20 reports of mines submitted on behalf of PMC “Wagner”, but none of them was confirmed. This was reported by “Sistema”, an investigative project of Radio Liberty and the TV channel Nastoyaschee Vremya.

On Saturday, June 24, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Moscow reported on the verification of 54 such threats, the evacuation of 13 surrendered and four and a half thousand people. At least 20 messages were received allegedly from PMC mercenaries “Wagner” and Evgeny Prigozhin. The investigators learned about this from non-public police reports.

Messages that directly mentioned a private military company and its owner were taken seriously by the police and security guards in almost half of the cases: eight guards and more than one and a half thousand people were evacuated.

The most mass evacuation due to possible threats to PMC “Wagner” took place in the museum complex “HES-2”. Almost 300 people were taken out of the building. 35 people were taken out of the Tretyakov Gallery – for the same reason, due to the call allegedly made by a fighter of PMC “Wagner”.

After the report about the mining of “hotels on Myasnitskaya”, the police removed about 200 guests from five different hotels. The same number of people had to be evacuated from the “Vykhodnoy” shopping center near Moscow in Lyubertsy.

Most of the reports about mining “from Prigozhin” remained without close attention of the authorities and evacuation. So, according to police reports, an unknown person said that he had mined one of the eight Capitol shopping centers. At the end of the letter, the attacker wrote: “Glory to Wagner! Down with Putinism.” People were not evacuated, no explosive devices were found, Sistema notes.

The “Crocus City Hall”, which was also reported to have been mined by Prigozhin’s supporters, was not evacuated either. The control rooms and services of Moscow airports also received dozens of reports about false mining, but they did not evacuate them either.

• On the night of June 24, the mercenaries of PMC “Wagner” marched from their bases in the east of Ukraine to the Rostov region without a fight, where they captured one of the largest cities in Russia – Rostov-on-Don and one of the headquarters of the Russian army without a fight. Later, they managed to block the Russian military in another city with a million population, Voronezh.
• As reported on June 24, the federal troops were preparing the first lines of real defense on the banks of the Oka in the Moscow region, a thousand kilometers from Rostov.
• The rebellion was stopped after negotiations with the participation of Alexander Lukashenko and PMC head Evgeny Prigozhin. He was guaranteed departure to the Republic of Belarus.
• During the mutiny, PMC fighters shot down several helicopters and a plane of the Russian army. 13 pilots died.

More news from Radio Liberty: