Head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office Kyrylo Budanov says he regularly spoke with Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin

Filed 1h ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: UNCTAD · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Kyrylo Budanov, now head of Ukraine's Presidential Office, told The New York Times he regularly communicated with Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin while running Ukraine's military intelligence directorate, HUR. Budanov says the contact stopped shortly before Wagner's June 2023 mutiny against Moscow, and offered no further detail on what the two discussed. No prior official account had placed the two men in direct contact.

The disclosure follows a 2023 Washington Post report, sourced to intelligence contacts, that Prigozhin had offered to trade information on Russian troop positions for a Ukrainian pullback from Bakhmut. Prigozhin himself mocked that report at the time with a sarcastic quip about being in Africa with Budanov. He died in a plane crash two months after the mutiny, and has not been available to confirm or deny anything since.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A wartime intelligence chief admitting years later that he was on speaking terms with the enemy's most notorious mercenary is the kind of story that used to require a leak, not a tidy sit-down interview. It says something about how convenient the truth becomes once the other party to the conversation has been dead for two years and can't add his own version. Take the timing of the confession as seriously as the confession itself.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: Amazing Plan · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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