Putin thanks troops for ‘stopping civil war’ during Wagner rebellion

Vladimir Putin delivered a rallying cry to Russia’s military and security services today, telling them they halted a slide into civil war when Wagner mercenaries rebelled and marched on Moscow, and held a minute’s silence for those killed in the brief clash. Moscow was brought to the brink of chaos on Saturday as mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ordered his forces into action, but backed down at the last minute upon striking an amnesty deal with the Kremlin. 

As part of this deal, Prigozhin agreed to go into exile in Russia’s neighboring ally Belarus, with the country’s President Alexander Lukashenko confirming that he had arrived on Tuesday, according to Belarusian state news agency BELTA. Hours after a plane belonging to Prigozhin landed in Minsk, the Russian president spoke to thousands of soldiers, telling them they ‘de facto stopped civil war.’ Addressing some 2,500 members of Russia’s security forces, National Guard and military units, he said the people and the armed forces had stood together in opposition to rebel mercenaries.

At the gathering, held on a square in the Kremlin complex, Putin was joined by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose dismissal the mercenary fighters of the Wagner group had demanded during their mutiny. Putin requested a minute of silence to honor Russian military pilots who were killed during the mutiny. As many as 15 Russian pilots were killed on Saturday after being ordered to engage a mercenary convoy headed to Moscow which shot them down, but a further escalation and a wider conflict was avoided. ‘In the confrontation with rebels, our comrades-in-arms, pilots, were killed. They did not flinch and honorably fulfilled their orders and their military duty,’ Putin said.

In a rare official insight into Moscow’s relationship with Wagner, Putin said the group had been entirely financed by the Russian state which spent 86 billion roubles ($1 billion) on it between May 2022 and May 2023. In addition, Prigozhin made almost as much during the same period from his food and catering business, Putin told his security forces. Putin’s latest public address came after a private jet belonging to Prigozhin landed in Belarus following his agreement to go into exile there.

According to flight tracking website Flight Radar, the Embraer Legacy 600 business jet with the number RA-02795 arrived in Minsk at 7:40am local time (5:40am GMT). The website showed the plane’s flight path, traveling from an unspecified location close to Rostov-on-Don (the Russian city seized by Wagner forces overnight on Friday), skirting around Ukraine through Russian airspace, before landing in Minsk. The jet’s arrival came amid reports that Moscow is preparing to transfer weapons and military hardware held by Wagner to the Russian army, and that the Kremlin is dropping charges against the group – following suggestions that the charges had in fact not been dropped, despite the amnesty deal.

Belarusian strongman leader Lukashenko said long-standing tensions between Moscow’s army and the Wagner mercenary group had been mismanaged. ‘We missed the situation, and then we thought that it would resolve itself, but it did not resolve… There are no heroes in this case,’ Lukashenko said. He is understood to have negotiated the deal between Prigozhin and Putin. Separate from Putin’s comments, the Kremlin said on Tuesday it did not agree with what it called the opinion of ‘pseudo specialists’ that an aborted armed mutiny had shaken or weakened Putin’s position. It has portrayed the Russian leader, in power as either president or prime minister since 1999, as having acted judiciously to avoid what it has called ‘the worst case scenario’ by giving time for talks that ended the mutiny without more bloodshed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the mutiny had shown how consolidated Russian society was around Putin when the chips were down. ‘The level of public consolidation…around the president is very high. These events demonstrated just how consolidated the society is around the president.’ Asked if the Russian leader’s position had been ‘shaken’ by the dramatic events, Peskov said: ‘We do not agree. There is now a lot of ultra-emotional hysteria among specialists, pseudo-specialists, political scientists and pseudo-politicians. It is also rippling through some hysterical new media, and on the Internet and so on. It has nothing to do with reality.’

Peskov said the Kremlin had no information on the whereabouts of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner group, who led the brief mutiny in protest at what he saw as the poor handling of military operations in Ukraine. Under the terms of a deal that ended the mutiny, Prigozhin was to be allowed to move to Belarus, and his fighters were given the chance to sign contracts with Russia’s regular armed forces or to move to Belarus with him. Peskov said the deal ending the mutiny was being implemented, and that Putin always kept his word. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban agreed with Peskov’s assessment, saying he does not believe the Wagner mercenary group’s mutiny has weakened Putin, calling it an ‘event of no major significance.’

Prigozhin broke his silence yesterday, insisting that he marched on Moscow to stop the Kremlin taking control of his mercenary army and denying a plot to overthrow Putin and the Russian government. Speaking in an 11-minute audio clip posted on Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels, Prigozhin claimed the armed uprising was a ‘master class’ on how Russia’s assault on Kyiv should have looked. He said he only called off his group’s surge for the Russian capital to avoid spilling Russian blood, adding that the uprising was intended to register a protest at the ineffectual conduct of the war in Ukraine.

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