Russian military leaders avoided an all-out “civil war” by persuading mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin to call off his armed march on Moscow over the weekend, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
Speaking to members of the armed forces at Moscow’s Cathedral Square, a symbolic location where the tsars celebrated their coronations, the Russian leader praised the country’s armed forces for preventing further violence and civilian deaths.
“The military and police officers of the Russian Federation stopped the civil war,” he said.
Prigozhin, who had been in an escalating spat with the country’s military leaders, accusing them of corruption, incompetence of rank and killing their fighters in Ukraine, has said he was not seeking to topple Putin but was acting to protect his strength. Wagner’s mercenary being destroyed by the defense ministry.
While Putin apparently sought to project authority and power after Prigozhin’s abortive “march of justice,” in which Wagner’s mercenaries came within 150 miles of Moscow, the Russian government sent mixed signals Tuesday, with the services of security closing a criminal investigation into the rebellion to no avail. charges
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko underlined how seriously the Wagner rebellion had been taken, saying his army had been put into “full combat readiness” in response.
“My position is: if Russia collapses, we will remain under the rubble, we will all die,” Lukashenko, Putin’s closest ally in Europe who claimed to have helped broker the deal that ended the armed mutiny, told reporters in Minsk.
Meanwhile, Prigozhin’s exact whereabouts remained a mystery Tuesday after he struck a deal with the government that reportedly allowed him to go to neighboring Belarus in exchange for withdrawing rebel forces.
Early Tuesday, a plane belonging to Prigozhin arrived in Belarus, according to a flight tracking website. It was not immediately known if Prigozhin was on the flight.
The flight tracking website Flightradar24 showed that an Embraer Legacy 600 jet with serial number RA02795 took off from St. Petersburg shortly after 1 a.m. local time (5 p.m. ET Monday), before landing in southern Russia. It then departed from an undisclosed location in Russia and landed in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at an unspecified time on Tuesday morning.
