Vladimir Putin is known for his tight control over the news media in Russia. His onetime ally, Wagner military group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, is himself the owner of a conservative media outlet and a flamboyant showman on social media.
But it was an unlikely figure who emerged with a public relations victory in the wake of Prigozhin’s mutiny: the longtime dictator of Belarus, the neighboring country that is firmly in Moscow’s orbit.
The Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is viewed largely as the Kremlin’s docile satrap. But on Sunday, he took credit for brokering an agreement between Putin and Prigozhin, averting a scenario that the Russian leader had compared to the civil war that followed the Revolution of 1917.