The war between Wagner and the Kremlin has entered the realm of propaganda, something that can be deadly in a country without freedom of expression and where dissident journalists have ended up in jail or poisoned. On Thursday, the official newspaper Izvestia released some humiliating images for the owner of the mercenary company, Evgeni Prigozhin, by showing the interior of his luxurious palace and his collection of wigs. The intention was to show the head of the mercenaries -who is still missing- as a hypocrite who is photographed with his men on the Ukrainian front and appears to share his hardships while his standard of living is that of a corrupt magnate. .
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The counterattack of Wagner’s followers has been up to the task. A Telegram channel close to Dimitry Utkin, the neo-Nazi founder of the mercenary company, has released some images of the eastern palace of Defense Minister, Serguei Shoigu. The head of the Russian armed forces is Prigozhin’s personal enemy and, according to American media, one of the objectives of the mutiny that the mercenaries carried out two weeks ago was to arrest Shoigu and his right-hand man, Valery Gerasimov, in his visit to the Rostov barracks. However, they both escaped.
The district of the oligarchs
Now, the followers of the mercenary army have divulged something that was not a secret in the West but that the Russian media has censored for more than seven years. Shoigu built a palace valued at more than 18 million dollars on the outskirts of Moscow in 2015, in Barvikha, the neighborhood where the oligarchs of the Putin regime display their power with exclusive mansions. A possession that could never be afforded with his public salary as a member of the Kremlin.
Shoigu Palace occupies an area of 9,000 square meters. It has a very peculiar style, more typical of Asian architecture than Russian. The explanation for this aesthetic preference is simple. Shoigu was born in the Siberian region of Tuva, almost on the border with Mongolia and very close to China. Tibetan Buddhism is one of the most widespread religions in this region and the Eastern world is very present in its culture.
poisoned in siberia
The existence of this palace was disclosed by the opponent Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s critics with the greatest social support in Russia. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence although he has a pending sentence of 30 years in prison in which he is accused by the Kremlin of “promoting terrorism and rehabilitating Nazism.” But also, he was poisoned in Siberia in 2020 and his life was saved thanks to the fact that he was able to be transferred to a hospital in Germany.
Navalny created an anti-corruption office -now closed by Putin- from which he reported on alleged excesses of the Russian oligarchy. That association reported in 2015 that Shoigu’s palace had been built on land bought by her daughter, Knesia Shoigu, when she was 18 years old. This young woman, a well-known triathlete, has been criticized for spending her time in Dubai -and telling it on her social media- while the country is at war. Subsequently, the entire urbanization was put in the name of the minister’s sister-in-law, Elena Antipina.
Information about Shoigu’s holdings was withheld by the Putin regime, which censors any negative news that may affect the oligarchs. The decision of Wagner’s followers to attack Shoigu on this flank sets them up against the entire Kremlin court. Likewise, he reveals that the pact reached after the mutiny, whereby the mercenaries could go to Belarus or join the Army, does not mean that Wagner’s fight against the Kremlin has ended. And now the soldiers of fortune have begun to tell the Russian people about official corruption, something that already places them with the opponents most hated by Moscow.
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