President restates commitment to ‘special military operation’ in comments seemingly recorded before mutiny
President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian state TV for the first time since the armed rebellion threatened to topple his regime and restated his commitment to the “special military operation” in Ukraine, though the comments appear to have been recorded before the mutiny.
There has been no change in the US nuclear posture after an armed rebellion in Russia, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said. He added that the Wagner uprising was a “direct challenge to Putin’s authority” that shows “real cracks” in Russia’s military direction.
All transport restrictions in Russia’s Rostov region – which was controlled by Wagner mutineers on Saturday – have been lifted, including those on highways, Russian news agencies reported on Sunday, citing local officials.
An adviser to the Ukrainian defence minister has described the Wagner rebellion in Russia as “the most ridiculous attempt at mutiny” ever.
In an abrupt about-face, the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, called off his troops’ march on Moscow and ordered them to move out of Rostov on Saturday. Under a deal brokered by Belarus, Prigozhin agreed to leave Russia and move to Belarus. He will not face charges and Wagner troops who took part in the rebellion will not face any action in recognition of their previous service to Russia.
Prigozhin said in a statement that he had wanted to avoid the spilling of Russian blood. “Now the moment has come when blood can be shed,” he said. “Therefore, realising all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed from one side, we will turn our convoys around and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.”
The Wagner leader was later pictured leaving the headquarters of the southern military district (SMD) in Rostov, which his forces had occupied on Saturday. Wagner forces also shot down three military helicopters and had entered the Lipetsk region, about 360km (225 miles) south of Moscow, before they were called back.
The press office of Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, was the first to announce that Prigozhin would be backing down. It said Lukashenko had negotiated a de-escalation with the Wagner head after talking to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Lukashenko said Putin had since thanked him for his negotiation efforts.
Putin has not publicly commented on Lukashenko’s deal with Prigozhin. He appeared on television earlier on Saturday in an emergency broadcast, issuing a nationwide call for unity in the face of a mutinous strike that he compared to the revolution of 1917. “Any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state, to us as a nation,” he said.
Putin reportedly took a plane heading north-west from Moscow on Saturday afternoon. His current whereabouts is unclear.
The Ukrainian president said that Putin was “obviously very afraid” and “probably hiding”. In his latest evening address, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said: “Today the world saw that the bosses of Russia do not control anything. Nothing at all. Complete chaos. Complete absence of any predictability. And it is happening on Russian territory, which is fully loaded with weapons.”
US spy agencies reportedly picked up information suggesting the Wagner leader was planning to take action against Russia’s military leadership as early as mid-June. The Washington Post and New York Times said US intelligence officials had conducted briefings at the White House and the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill about the potential for unrest in Russia the day before it unfolded.
Analysts have been confounded by the events. Most say it is too early to determine whether Putin will fall but agree he has been substantially damaged. The Institute for the Study of War noted that the Kremlin struggled to put together a coherent response to the mutiny and that “Wagner likely could have reached the outskirts of Moscow if Prigozhin chose to order them to do so”.
Ukraine’s military said on Saturday that its forces had made advances near Bakhmut, on the eastern front, and farther south. The deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, said an offensive was launched near a group of villages ringing Bakhmut, which Wagner forces took control of in May after months of fighting. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the commander of the southern front, said Ukrainian forces had liberated an area near Krasnohorivka, west of the Russian-held regional centre of Donetsk.