President Vladimir Putin praised members of Russia’s military and security forces at a ceremony on Tuesday as he sought to reassert his authority following an abortive mutiny by mercenaries led by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
“With your brothers in arms, you opposed these riots, the result of which would inevitably have been chaos,” Putin declared during a ceremony before the military in Moscow. “In practice, they avoided a civil war,” he added, before calling for a minute’s silence for the pilots who died at the hands of the rebels “honorably doing their duty.”
A plane linked to Prigozhin arrived in Belarus from Russia, believed to be carrying the mercenary boss into exile, three days after he abruptly called off his mutiny with his fighters attacking the capital. Authorities have dropped a criminal case against Wagner, state news agency RIA reported, apparently complying a condition of a deal agreed on Saturday night that calmed the crisis.
Putin told some 2,500 security personnel gathered in a square in the Kremlin compound that the people and the armed forces had united to oppose the rebel mercenaries. He was joined by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose dismissal had been one of the main demands of the mutineers. The fighters had shot down several planes during their run towards Moscow, although they met no resistance on the ground.
Putin said on Tuesday that his country paid one billion dollars to the Wagner paramilitary group in the last year, three days after an armed rebellion that failed. Prigozhin, now a former Putin ally and ex-convict whose mercenaries fought the bloodiest battles of the Ukrainian war and suffered heavy casualties, had said he would go to neighboring Belarus at the invitation of its presidentPutin’s close ally Alexander Lukashenko.
Details of his proposed exile trip were not made public and there was no confirmation of his whereabouts. in the three days since the riot, even if he was on board the plane tracked in Belarus on Tuesday morning.
The Flightradar24 flight tracking service website showed an Embraer Legacy 600 aircraft, with identification codes matching a plane linked to Prigozhin in US sanctions documents, descending to a landing altitude near the capital of Belarus, Minsk.
It first appeared on the tracking site over Rostov, the southern Russian city that Prigozhin’s fighters had captured during the mutiny. He was last seen in public on Saturday night, smiling and waving at passersby. as he left Rostov in the back of a jeep after ordering his men to withdraw.
Putin said in a televised speech Monday night that the leaders of the mutiny had betrayed their homeland, although he did not mention Prigozhin by name. Wagner’s fighters would be allowed to settle in Belarus, join the Russian army or go home, he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a press conference on Tuesday that an agreement to end the riot was being implemented and that he had no information about where Prigozhin was. He also said he did not know how many Wagner fighters would sign contracts with the Defense Ministry. He dismissed the idea that Putin’s grip on power had been shaken by the riot, calling such thoughts “hysteria.”
Prigozhin, 62, said he launched the mutiny to save his group after being ordered to place it under the command of the Defense Ministry. His fighters halted their campaign on Saturday to avoid bloodshed after nearly reaching Moscow and regretted being forced to shoot down planes on the way, he said.
“We went as a protest rally, not to overthrow the government of the country,” Prigozhin said in an audio message on Monday.
In the overnight speech, Putin, his first public comments since the mutiny, confirmed that Russian pilots had been killed and thanked the Russians for showing patriotic solidarity. Russia’s enemies wanted to see the country “drown in bloody civil conflict,” but Russia would not succumb to “any blackmail, any attempt to create internal turmoil,” Putin said.
Russian leaders have tried to convey that the situation is returning to normal after the aborted riot. The head of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed otherwise, and some people in Rostov, where his fighters occupied the fourth military general, greeted them. Putin met on Monday night with the heads of the security services, including Defense Minister Shoigu.
Putin also indicated that neither the army nor the Russian population supported the armed rebellion of the Wagner group, furthermore, he finally assured that the Russian army did not have to deploy any soldiers present in Ukrainian territory to face the rebellion.
“The people who were drawn into the rebellion saw that the army and the people were not on their side. We did not have to withdraw the combat units from the area of the special military operation,” he said.
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late-night speech that the military had made progress on Monday in all sectors of the front line, calling it a “happy day.” kyiv hopes the chaos caused by the attempted mutiny in Russia will undermine Russian defenses as Ukraine pushes forward with a counteroffensive to recapture the occupied territory. He claimed on Monday to have captured a ninth village in the south, where he has been advancing since early June.
Explosions were heard in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk after a Russian airstrike on Tuesday, a Ukrainian air force spokesman said. It is the site of a Ukrainian oil refinery that has been repeatedly attacked by Russia since it invaded Ukraine last year. Ukrainian officials have said that it no longer works.
With information from AFP | dm