In an address to the nation on June 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wagner mercenaries who took part in the revolt over the weekend can either join the Russian army or go to Belarus.
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“Today you have the option to continue serving Russia by entering into a contract with the Ministry of Defense or other law enforcement agencies, or to return to your family and friends. If you want, you can go to Belarus. The promise I made will be fulfilled,” Putin said. “I repeat: the choice is yours.”
Putin also thanked the Russian people for their unity and thanked the mercenary group’s commanders and soldiers for avoiding bloodshed in what is widely regarded as the greatest challenge to Putin’s 23-year rule.
Putin did not mention Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in his brief remarks, but said the organizers of the revolt had betrayed the Russian people.
He warned that any attempt at blackmail or unrest in Russia was “doomed to fail” and claimed the West wanted Russians to “kill each other”.
US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders said the brief uprising was part of a struggle within the Russian system. Biden said neither the United States nor its allies were involved.
Biden’s message was sent directly to the Russians through various diplomatic channels, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters. He did not characterize Russia’s reaction.
Meanwhile, Prigozhin previously said the intention of his troops’ march toward Moscow over the weekend was to highlight the incompetence of Russia’s military leadership in the war against Ukraine, rather than to overthrow the Russian government, which is widely seen as Putin’s greatest challenge will be 23 years of reign.
In his first public statement since the march was called off just 200 kilometers from the Russian capital, Prigozhin continued to sound defiant in an 11-minute audio clip on June 26, saying his progress was a “master class” in how the Russian army should have behaved declared his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and found several loopholes in military security that allowed his group to easily take control of cities on its advance towards Moscow.
Prigozhin did not reveal his current whereabouts, nor did he give any details of an agreement reportedly negotiated by Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenka that would have granted him asylum in Belarus.
PODCAST: Why did Yevgeny Prigozhin stop Wagner’s advance towards Moscow so abruptly? How weakened is Russian President Vladimir Putin and what could the 24-hour uprising mean for the course of the war in Ukraine?
A short-lived mutiny and its long-term consequences
“We started our march because of an injustice,” said Prigozhin, once a close Putin ally, referring to an alleged attack on his troops that he blames on the Russian military.
“We went there to demonstrate our protest and not to overthrow power in the country,” Prigozhin added, repeatedly denying that he and his troops planned to seize power.
He said the goal of what he called “our march of justice” was to prevent the “breakup of Wagner’s private military campaign and to show how the special military operation should have been conducted in fact.”
But then he added that Wagner wanted to cease existence on July 1 “due to intrigues and bad decisions” after his commanders spoke to the fighters “and nobody agreed to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense”.
SEE ALSO: ‘It was tense’: How Russia’s Rostov-on-Don one day served as the starting point for Prigozhin’s mutiny
Prigozhin also noted in his lengthy comment that his troops “did not kill a single Russian soldier on land” but shot down several Defense Ministry planes after the planes “bombed us and attacked us with rockets.”
In Washington, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the United States had used various diplomatic channels to tell Russia that there was no US involvement in the insurgency. Kirby did not say how Moscow reacted to what he described as “good, direct communication.”
He could not confirm whether Prigozhin was in Belarus and said it was too early to know what would become of the Wagner group.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that while Washington does not know what will happen to Wagner in Ukraine, the weekend’s events are increasing Washington’s concerns about the instability Wagner brings when his forces engage in conflict .
Wagner has fought in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali and Syria since its inception in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and began supporting pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region.
The United States is renewing “the message that we have historically given these countries, publicly and privately, that every time Wagner enters the country, death and destruction ensue,” Miller told reporters. “You see Wagner exploiting the local population, we see them exploiting local wealth, we see them committing human rights abuses.”
Prigozhin’s recording was released as Russian authorities sought to return to normalcy by rolling back counter-terrorism measures in the capital and some regions following Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny.
In Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced that counter-terrorism measures imposed in the Russian capital during the Prigozhin mutiny attempt have been lifted.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) separately announced the lifting of all temporary restrictions in the Moscow region, while the governor of the Voronezh region Aleksandr Gusev also said that the anti-terrorist regime in his region would be lifted after the departure of Prigozhin’s fighters had been.
SEE ALSO: Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose dismissal was one of Prigozhin’s main demands, was seen in a video visiting troops.
The Russian Defense Ministry released a silent video on June 26 purporting to show Shoigu flying on a plane with a colleague and listening to reports at a command post. It was not immediately clear where and when the footage had been taken.
Earlier, the RIA Novosti news agency said Shoigu had visited Russian troops involved in the military operation in Ukraine. The information could not be independently confirmed.
Under the deal brokered by Lukashenko and reported by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, criminal charges against the mutineers would be dropped in exchange for their return to the camps, while Prigozhin would move to Belarus.
SEE ALSO: A ‘New Dimension’: What Happens Next After Prigozhin’s Mutiny?
But the Russian newspaper Kommersant and the TASS news agency reported on June 26, citing unknown sources, that Prigozhin is still being investigated by the FSB on suspicion of organizing an armed mutiny.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, visiting Lithuania on June 26, said Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny showed Moscow had made a strategic mistake by waging war on Ukraine.
“The events of the weekend are an internal matter of Russia and further evidence of the President’s major strategic error.” [Vladimir] “Putin contributed with his illegal annexation of Crimea and the war against Ukraine,” he told reporters in Vilnius. “As Russia continues its attack, it is all the more important to continue our support for Ukraine.”
European Union ministers said at a meeting in Luxembourg the failed uprising raises questions about Putin’s retention of power.
“We are analyzing this carefully,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told reporters. “This also entails risks that we cannot assess at the moment. For us Europeans, only the support of Ukraine counts.”
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who chaired the meeting, said that the political system “has fragility and military power is crumbling” and that now is the time to give Ukraine more support than ever.
In Russia, road repairs and eerie calm after the Wagner uprising
Addressing ministers via video link, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged ministers to use the latest developments.
“Russia is getting weaker every day. “It is now crucial to provide Ukraine with all the weapons it needs,” he said, including artillery and missiles, but also tougher sanctions.
Meanwhile, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said early June 26 that Ukrainian forces had retaken 130 square kilometers to the south since the long-awaited counteroffensive began in Kiev.
Malyar called on her Telegram channel that despite fierce Russian resistance and “significant” human and material losses, the Ukrainian military continued to make advances in the Melitopol and Berdyansk areas of the southern Zaporizhia region.
“Overall since the beginning of our [counter]Offensively, the liberated area in the south is 130 square kilometers,” she said.
Separately, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in its daily report early June 26 that Ukrainian forces had successfully repelled intensified Russian advance attempts in the eastern Donetsk region, repelling 36 attacks in the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiyivka and Maryinka areas over the course of the last day.
The General Staff also reported that Ukrainian troops were present continue their business in the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, without providing further details.
With coverage from Portal and AP