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Russian president Vladimir Putin has condemned the organisers of last weekend’s shortlived mutiny, saying they had betrayed their country and the fighters in their command.
In his first public comments since the end of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed uprising on Saturday, Putin told Wagner paramilitaries to sign contracts with Russia’s defence ministry, go home or leave the country for Belarus.
The Russian president’s angry five-minute speech on Monday insisted Wagner’s revolt had been doomed to fail from the outset. In his appeal to Wagner’s rank-and-file, Putin said the mutiny’s organisers had “betrayed the country and those who were with them”, adding most of the group’s fighters were “patriots of Russia” who had been “used” by their command.
The head of the Wagner militia has denied trying to overthrow the Russian government. Reiterating his criticism of the country’s defence establishment, Prigozhin said in an 11-minute voice recording posted on Telegram on Monday that his goal had been to protest against a recent decision to disband Wagner and demonstrate the weakness of Russia’s domestic defences.
“We didn’t have the goal of toppling the existing regime, which is lawfully elected, as we have said many times,” said Prigozhin, who did not refer to Putin by name.
Instead, he wanted to “prevent the destruction” of the paramilitary group and hold to account those who, “with their unprofessional actions, made a huge amount of mistakes” during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He said that if the regular army had received the same level of training and morale as Wagner, the war in Ukraine, which began on February 24 last year, “may have taken no more than a day”.
“We demonstrated the level of organisation that the Russian army should have,” Prigozhin said, claiming that his forces crossed a total of 780km and stopped just 200km short of Moscow. “It was a masterclass in how February 24 2022 should’ve looked.”
Until his own message on Monday afternoon, Prigozhin had also not been heard from since he announced that his convoy would turn back rather than continuing on to Moscow. “Our decision to turn around came from two important factors,” he added. “The first was that we did not want to spill Russian blood. The second, we were marching to demonstrate our protest, not to unseat the government.”
Prigozhin’s revolt on Saturday has been widely seen as the most serious threat to Putin’s rule since he took office 23 years ago.
“This was part of a struggle within the Russian system,” US president Joe Biden said on Monday. “We had nothing to do with it.”
Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, described Prigozhin as “the monster acting against his creator” and said the weekend’s chaos proved that Putin’s “military power is cracking”.
But Ben Wallace, UK defence secretary, played down the impact on Putin’s authority, maintaining that “we shouldn’t necessarily over-credit the destabilisation, that somehow this is a massive derailment of the Kremlin”.
Speaking to the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, Wallace emphasised that the war in Ukraine was still being prosecuted by Valery Gerasimov, army chief of staff, and Sergei Shoigu, defence minister, Prigozhin’s main hate figures within the Russian system.
State media reported on Monday that Prigozhin still faced prosecution, despite the Kremlin saying at the weekend that the legal case against Prigozhin “will be ended”.
Prigozhin has railed against Gerasimov and Shoigu for many months, accusing them of killing tens of thousands of Russian soldiers through corruption and poor planning.
The long-running feud came to a head in June after laws were passed to make all irregular forces — of which Wagner is the largest and most prominent — pledge allegiance to the defence ministry while subsuming them into its structure.
Wagner was willing to proceed as ordered, Prigozhin claimed, and was packing up its military equipment last week, with plans to head to Rostov-on-Don in a convoy on June 30 to hand over everything to the army.
Then on Friday, he claimed, Wagner base camps were hit with air strikes by the Russian military, killing more than two dozen of his troops. A similar account was denied by the defence ministry on Friday evening.
Prigozhin said the militia not only managed to seize Rostov-on-Don, a major southern city and military headquarters, but also managed to disarm the military obstacles placed in its way and take over all the bases and airfields that lay in its path.
Residents, moreover, had been happy to see Wagner pass, Prigozhin claimed. “Civilians met us with Russian and Wagner flags . . . Many of them continue to write words of support, and others are disappointed that we stopped.”
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