Vladimir Putin rebukes Wagner mercenary leader in first public address since end of mutiny

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A furious President Vladimir Putin declared on Monday that Russia had survived an attempt to push the country into civil war when mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin aborted his weekend uprising just a few hundred kilometres from Moscow.

In a brief televised speech, Mr. Putin thanked his country’s military for holding firm, and claimed that he had given orders to avoid bloodshed during the mutiny led by Mr. Prigozhin and his Wagner private military company. Wagner fighters left the front lines of the war in Ukraine late Friday and swiftly captured the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don before launching a lightning push up the M-4 highway toward Moscow on Saturday.

The uprising ended a few hours later – with Wagner fighters just over 300 kilometres south of the Russian capital – when Mr. Prigozhin accepted a deal that saw him and his men reportedly offered safe passage to Belarus, a close Russian ally. Mr. Putin thanked Wagner commanders for deciding “at the last line” not to engage in “fratricidal bloodshed.”

But he had harsh words for his long-time ally Mr. Prigozhin, without directly naming the Wagner boss.

“The organizers of the rebellion, betraying their country, their people, betrayed those who were drawn into the crime. They lied to them, pushed them to death, under fire, to shoot at their own,” Mr. Putin said in the five-minute address. He said the mutiny had served Russia’s enemies in Ukraine and the West.

Mr. Putin’s televised remarks came hours after Mr. Prigozhin made his own first public comments since the crisis abated. The man once nicknamed “Putin’s chef” – who rose from catering meals for the Kremlin 20 years ago to overseeing a mercenary group of 25,000 fighters deployed in war zones around the globe – said he had never intended to challenge the President, only to make clear his displeasure with the leadership of the Russian army that he said had bungled the invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden said he had spoken with Western leaders over the weekend, including a Sunday call to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to co-ordinate a message that the struggle for power in Russia was an internal one. “We had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse – let me emphasize – we gave Putin no excuse to blame this on the West or to blame this on NATO,” Mr. Biden said at the beginning of a speech in Washington that was otherwise dedicated to investment in internet access.

Mr. Trudeau stuck to the same script during a visit to Iceland on Monday. “Everyone has a lot of questions about what this actually means, but we don’t yet have a lot of answers and too much speculation right now I think could probably be extremely counterproductive,” he said.

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But that didn’t stop Mr. Putin from accusing the West of “rubbing its hands and dreaming” at the prospect of Russia descending into chaos. “They wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that military personnel and civilians would die, so that in the end Russia would lose, and our society would split and choke in bloody civil strife.”

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there would be an investigation into whether Western intelligence agencies played a role in the Wagner mutiny.

While video clips over the weekend showed Rostov residents cheering the Wagner fighters – who met surprisingly little resistance on their charge toward Moscow – Mr. Putin praised Russia’s “civilian solidarity,” which he said “showed that any blackmail, any attempts to organize internal turmoil, are doomed to fail.”

Mr. Putin said that Wagner members – who he claimed had been “kept in the dark” and used by their leaders – would be given a choice of going into exile in Belarus, signing contracts with the regular Russian army, or returning home to their families. Verstka, an independent website affiliated with the Russian opposition, reported on Monday that camps to host Wagner fighters were being constructed in the eastern Mogilev region of Belarus, about 200 kilometres from the country’s border with Ukraine.

It wasn’t clear whether Mr. Prigozhin would be given the same options. While initial reports on Saturday suggested he had been offered an amnesty as part of the deal that brought an end to the mutiny, Kremlin-controlled media reported on Monday that the Wagner boss was still under active investigation.

Mr. Prigozhin had repeatedly accused the regular Russian army of starving his troops – who played a front-line role in the nine-month siege of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut – of ammunition and support in recent months in what he said was an attempt to weaken his private army.

“We went to demonstrate our protest, and not to overthrow the government in the country,” Mr. Prigozhin said in an audio file released by his press service. He said he halted Wagner’s push toward Moscow as soon as it became clear that entering the capital would entail a major battle.

“We halted at the moment when the first assault unit deployed its artillery, conducted reconnaissance and realized that a lot of blood would be spilled,” Mr. Prigozhin said in the 11-minute address, during which he made no mention of his location.

The primary target of Mr. Prigozhin’s ire has been Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, and there was widespread speculation that he would lose his post as part of the pact that ended the rebellion. However, Mr. Shoigu was shown twice on Russian state television on Monday, once flying to a command post and examining maps of the war in Ukraine, the second time at a meeting of Mr. Putin’s security cabinet.

The second clip, in particular, appears to be a show of support for Mr. Shoigu, indicating that he was continuing in his job as usual after the mutiny. At the start of the meeting with his security officials, Mr. Putin told the ministers that they were gathering to discuss “the tasks before us as a result of the events that happened in the country.”

But the display of Mr. Putin and his ministers carrying on with business as usual failed to convince even Russia’s usually tame newspapers. “Prigozhin goes, but the problems remain” was the front-page headline in Monday’s edition of Moskovsky Komsomolets. “Russia has shown its vulnerability – to the whole world, and to itself.”