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Moscow: Wagner’s mercenaries They returned to their base on Sunday after Russian President Vladimir put it in They agreed to allow their leader to avoid charges of treason and to accept exile in neighboring Belarus.
The deal was halted by an unusual crisis – a private army led by a former close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin Attempt to storm Moscow But analysts said Wagner’s rebellion exposed Putin’s rule as more fragile than previously thought.
Security measures were still in place in Moscow on Sunday, though fewer policemen showed up and bystanders said they were indifferent, though Prigozhin’s exact whereabouts were not known.
“Of course I was shaken at first,” Lyudmila Shmeleva, 70, told AFP as she walked through Moscow’s Red Square. “I didn’t expect this.”
“We are fighting, and there is also an internal enemy who stabs you in the back, as President Putin said,” she said. “But we just walk around and relax and don’t feel any danger.”
Prigozhin was last seen late Saturday in an SUV leaving Rostov-on-Don, where his fighters have taken over a military headquarters, to cheers from some locals. Some shook hands with him through the car window.
Trucks with armored vehicles with fighters on them followed his car.
From an assessment of the geolocated footage, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Wagner’s forces had approached the Russian capital by about 330 kilometers, while Prigozhin himself claimed “within 24 hours we came to 200 kilometers from Moscow”.
The mutiny was the culmination of a long-running quarrel with the senior officers of the Russian army over Slouk Russian operation in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Putin denounced the rebellion as treason and vowed to punish the perpetrators. He accused them of pushing Russia to the brink of civil war.
But later the same day, he agreed to a deal brokered by Belarus to avert Moscow’s most serious security crisis in decades.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Joe Biden discussed the insurgency on Sunday, ahead of a NATO summit in Lithuania next month.
“The world must pressure Russia until international order is restored,” Zelensky said on Twitter, adding that he again invoked the possibility of Ukraine having “long-range weapons” as it seeks a counteroffensive against the Russian occupiers.
Within hours of Prigozhin’s announcement that his forces would return to the base to avoid “Russian bloodshed,” the Kremlin said the former Putin ally was leaving for Belarus.
She added that Russia would drop charges of “armed rebellion” against Prigozhin and would not prosecute Wagner soldiers.
Ukraine has reveled in the chaos, stepping up its counterattack against Russian forces, with analysts saying the agreement exposed the Russian president’s weak grip on power.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said he had negotiated the armistice with Prigozhin. Moscow thanked him, but observers noted that the intervention of Lukashenko, usually seen as Putin’s junior partner, was in itself an embarrassment.
Zelensky’s top aide, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that “Prigozhin humiliated Putin / The state and showed that there is no longer a monopoly on violence.”
But Russian state-run news agency TASS, citing an interview with Serbian TV channel Pink, said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic credited Putin’s “strong reaction” for the sudden de-escalation.
He was quoted as saying “no one else alive today would have been able to stop him.”
Russia, meanwhile, insisted the insurrection had no impact on its faltering campaign in Ukraine, and on Sunday said it had repulsed new offensive attacks by Ukrainian forces.
Ukrainian soldiers who left the front line on Sunday said the rebellion had not significantly affected the fighting around Pakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
“Most people, mostly military, understand very well that the circus coming from Russia is still there,” said Nazar, 26, a bearded soldier standing at a service station on a road outside Bakhmut district.
But Kiev said the unrest provided an “opportunity” for its long-awaited counter-offensive.
The Wagner fighters—made up of volunteers and former security officers, but also thousands of convicts—were often thrown into the forefront of Russia’s advances in Ukraine.
The group also conducts several operations in the Middle East and Africa, which are largely seen as having Moscow’s blessing.
“The crisis of institutions and trust was not clear to many in Russia and the West yesterday. Today it is clear,” independent political analyst Konstantin Kalachev told AFP.
“Putin underestimated Prigozhin, just as he underestimated Zelensky before that. He could have stopped that with a phone call to Prigozhin but he didn’t.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that Wagner’s short-lived uprising represents a “direct challenge to Putin’s authority” and “shows real cracks” in the authority of the Russian state.
French President Emmanuel Macron also said that the march on Moscow “shows the divisions that exist within the Russian camp, and the fragility of both its army and its auxiliary forces.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Gang, who has maintained close ties with Putin since the start of the Ukraine operation, met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko in Beijing on Sunday.
Afterwards, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the mercenary revolt an “internal affair” of Russia and expressed support for Putin’s government.
The deal was halted by an unusual crisis – a private army led by a former close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin Attempt to storm Moscow But analysts said Wagner’s rebellion exposed Putin’s rule as more fragile than previously thought.
Security measures were still in place in Moscow on Sunday, though fewer policemen showed up and bystanders said they were indifferent, though Prigozhin’s exact whereabouts were not known.
“Of course I was shaken at first,” Lyudmila Shmeleva, 70, told AFP as she walked through Moscow’s Red Square. “I didn’t expect this.”
“We are fighting, and there is also an internal enemy who stabs you in the back, as President Putin said,” she said. “But we just walk around and relax and don’t feel any danger.”
Prigozhin was last seen late Saturday in an SUV leaving Rostov-on-Don, where his fighters have taken over a military headquarters, to cheers from some locals. Some shook hands with him through the car window.
Trucks with armored vehicles with fighters on them followed his car.
From an assessment of the geolocated footage, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Wagner’s forces had approached the Russian capital by about 330 kilometers, while Prigozhin himself claimed “within 24 hours we came to 200 kilometers from Moscow”.
The mutiny was the culmination of a long-running quarrel with the senior officers of the Russian army over Slouk Russian operation in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Putin denounced the rebellion as treason and vowed to punish the perpetrators. He accused them of pushing Russia to the brink of civil war.
But later the same day, he agreed to a deal brokered by Belarus to avert Moscow’s most serious security crisis in decades.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Joe Biden discussed the insurgency on Sunday, ahead of a NATO summit in Lithuania next month.
“The world must pressure Russia until international order is restored,” Zelensky said on Twitter, adding that he again invoked the possibility of Ukraine having “long-range weapons” as it seeks a counteroffensive against the Russian occupiers.
Within hours of Prigozhin’s announcement that his forces would return to the base to avoid “Russian bloodshed,” the Kremlin said the former Putin ally was leaving for Belarus.
She added that Russia would drop charges of “armed rebellion” against Prigozhin and would not prosecute Wagner soldiers.
Ukraine has reveled in the chaos, stepping up its counterattack against Russian forces, with analysts saying the agreement exposed the Russian president’s weak grip on power.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said he had negotiated the armistice with Prigozhin. Moscow thanked him, but observers noted that the intervention of Lukashenko, usually seen as Putin’s junior partner, was in itself an embarrassment.
Zelensky’s top aide, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that “Prigozhin humiliated Putin / The state and showed that there is no longer a monopoly on violence.”
But Russian state-run news agency TASS, citing an interview with Serbian TV channel Pink, said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic credited Putin’s “strong reaction” for the sudden de-escalation.
He was quoted as saying “no one else alive today would have been able to stop him.”
Russia, meanwhile, insisted the insurrection had no impact on its faltering campaign in Ukraine, and on Sunday said it had repulsed new offensive attacks by Ukrainian forces.
Ukrainian soldiers who left the front line on Sunday said the rebellion had not significantly affected the fighting around Pakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
“Most people, mostly military, understand very well that the circus coming from Russia is still there,” said Nazar, 26, a bearded soldier standing at a service station on a road outside Bakhmut district.
But Kiev said the unrest provided an “opportunity” for its long-awaited counter-offensive.
The Wagner fighters—made up of volunteers and former security officers, but also thousands of convicts—were often thrown into the forefront of Russia’s advances in Ukraine.
The group also conducts several operations in the Middle East and Africa, which are largely seen as having Moscow’s blessing.
“The crisis of institutions and trust was not clear to many in Russia and the West yesterday. Today it is clear,” independent political analyst Konstantin Kalachev told AFP.
“Putin underestimated Prigozhin, just as he underestimated Zelensky before that. He could have stopped that with a phone call to Prigozhin but he didn’t.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that Wagner’s short-lived uprising represents a “direct challenge to Putin’s authority” and “shows real cracks” in the authority of the Russian state.
French President Emmanuel Macron also said that the march on Moscow “shows the divisions that exist within the Russian camp, and the fragility of both its army and its auxiliary forces.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Gang, who has maintained close ties with Putin since the start of the Ukraine operation, met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko in Beijing on Sunday.
Afterwards, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the mercenary revolt an “internal affair” of Russia and expressed support for Putin’s government.
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