If Putin was fleeing, the LAST place he would go is St Petersburg, which is Wagner HQ and home base.
St. Petersburg is Putin’s home=base from the 90s.
That’s where he signed on Prigozhin.
Prigozhin was born in 1961 in what was then Leningrad. As a teenager he was caught, and punished, for theft — the first in a series of increasingly more serious crimes, including armed robbery and trafficking in underage minors, that led to him serving just over nine years in prison.
He was released in 1990 at a time when the Soviet Union was in the full throes of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms. Along with his mother’s second husband, Prigozhin opened a chain of hot dog stands, which, by his own account, was wildly successful.
It’s unclear when Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin first developed, though as a budding entrepreneur in St. Petersburg he most likely would have crossed paths with Putin, whose political career started in the city’s mayor office in the 1990s.
Prigozhin later got into the restaurant business; his St. Petersburg eateries were luxurious and frequented by the city’s powerful and elite. He later expanded his food business into catering contracts under a company called Concord Catering — first for schools, hospitals, and prisons, and then for bigger government events.
He also snagged catering contracts for the Kremlin and other Russian elites, earning him the moniker “Putin’s chef.”
In 2012, Prigozhin’s companies netted a lucrative contract from a Defense Ministry agency to provide food and catering services for the Russian military. The contract ended a few years later after Sergei Shoigu, an emergency situations minister and longtime Putin loyalist, was appointed defense minister— a fact that may have later fueled Prigozhin’s enmity toward Shoigu.
As to Putin - In May 1990, Putin was appointed as an advisor on international affairs to the mayor of Leningrad Anatoly Sobchak.
On 28 June 1991, he became head of the Committee for External Relations of the Mayor’s Office. Within a year, Putin was investigated by the city legislative council led by Marina Salye. It was concluded that he had understated prices and permitted the export of metals valued at $93 million in exchange for foreign food aid that never arrived
In March 1994, Putin was appointed as first deputy chairman of the Government of Saint Petersburg. In May 1995, he organized the Saint Petersburg branch of the pro-government Our Home – Russia political party, the liberal party of power founded by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. In 1995, he managed the legislative election campaign for that party, and from 1995 through June 1997, he was the leader of its Saint Petersburg branch.
—> Information about his criminal activities in St. Petersburg can be found in the book “Wowa, Wolodia, Wladimir”