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.
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