Mourners and soldiers on Saturday laid flowers at a new statue of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a pro-Kremlin mercenary who staged a mutiny and died in a plane crash, at his grave in Saint Petersburg.
Prigozhin was head of the Wagner private militia, which fought alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, capturing the city of Bakhmut in a grinding months-long assault.
He staged a 24-hour mutiny last June, seizing Russian military command buildings in the southern city of Rostov and marching on Moscow in a bid to oust the country’s military leaders.
In voice messages published to social media, he had raged daily against what he said was corruption and mismanagement of the offensive by bureaucrats in Russia’s Defense Ministry and General Staff.
Two months later, after backing down and being scolded as a traitor by President Vladimir Putin, he died in a plane crash.
On Saturday, when he would have turned 63, a bronze statue of Prigozhin was unveiled at his grave in Saint Petersburg’s Porokhovskoye cemetery.
