After Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion against the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the infamous leader and 35 of the mercenaries, according to the president’s own description to the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
There, the Russian president is said to have presented a new leader: Andrei Troshev. Actually, only Troshev’s call command was presented in the interview, “Sedoj”, which means gray hair in Russian.
Putin says, according to the Russian newspaper, that it is under Troshev’s command that the Wagner forces have served for the past 16 months.
Troshev’s career in Wagner
Andrej “Sedoj” Troshev is one of the co-founders of Wagner and one of the organization’s top executives, according to EU sanctions documents from 2021, reports CNN.
When the EU was to introduce sanctions during the war in Syria, they described Troshev’s role as chief of staff for the Wagner Group’s regime-supporting efforts in the country. In British sanctions documents from 2022, including those concerning the war in Syria, Troshev is described as the top boss of the Wagner group.
According to the sanctions documents, Troshev was born in what was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1953.
He became a Russian war hero in the Second Chechen War and received several medals for his efforts. He is said to have also participated in the war in Afghanistan and then the war in Syria.
Prigozhin’s fate unclear
What happened to Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was described as the leader of the Wagner Group right up until the uprising against the Kremlin on June 24, is still unclear. He has not been seen in public for weeks, and Belarusian President Lukashenko says he is not there, even though it was in Belarus that he was promised sanctuary after the uprising.
An American general said this week that he guesses that Prigozhin is no longer alive.