MOSCOW.- Russian President Vladimir Putin assured this Tuesday that the financing of the Wagner Group, which rebelled against the Russian military leadership last weekend, was fully borne by the state budget.
«The maintenance of the Wagner Group was fully the responsibility of the State, the Ministry of Defense and the state coffers», Putin said in a meeting with the Russian military in the Kremlin.
“We fully funded that group,” he insisted.
Putin specified that only “between May 2022 and May 2023, the State allocated 86,000 million rubles (about 1,014 million dollars) for the maintenance of the Wagner Group,” a private military company that is illegal in Russia.
Meanwhile, the owner of the Concord company and Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, earned 80 billion rubles (about 945 million dollars) in one year by supplying food to the Russian Army, he said.
«I hope that nobody has stolen anything or has stolen little. But we’re definitely going to take care of that.” he assured, hinting at an investigation into the use of public money by the Wagnerites who had been fighting the war in Ukraine for 16 months until they rose up against the Russian military leadership.
