A visibly angry Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday night he would have put down an uprising from the Wagner paramilitary group if it were a major threat to his rule or the country.
Even if Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had made it to Moscow, an “armed rebellion would have been suppressed, anyway,” Putin said in a speech from the Kremlin.
“Civil solidarity showed that any blackmail and attempts to organize an internal mutiny will end in defeat,” Putin said.
“They wanted Russians to fight each other,” he added. “They rubbed their hands, dreaming of taking revenge for their failures at the front and during the so-called counteroffensive. But they miscalculated.”
Putin said he gave those involved in the rebellion several choices: enroll in the Russian military, go home, or go to Belarus. He did not mention Prigozhin by name.
“I thank those soldiers and commanders of the Wagner group who made the only right decision — they did not go for fratricidal bloodshed; they stopped at the last line,” Putin said.
Wagner is a paid-for-hire military outfit that Putin sent into Ukraine to help with the ground war. Putin previously sent members to Syria to assist in the civil war against President Bashar al-Assad, turning the tide in his favor.
Earlier Monday, Prigozhin said in an audio message he was marching to Moscow to protest the treatment of Wagner fighters, not to challenge Putin’s rule.
The group’s fate remains in limbo, but a defiant Prigozhin said it would operate out of Belarus.
Also Monday, a lower house of the Russian parliament weighed on the weekend’s events.
Russian state media quoted Andrey Kartapolov, head of the Duma’s Defense Committee, as saying, “No chaos arose in the Russian defense forces in the background of an attempted armed rebellion, combat control was not interrupted even for a minute.”
Kartapolov also said Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive against the Russians was not going as planned because of heavy losses.
“There was and is no large-scale counteroffensive,” Kartapolov said on Russian state TV. “There are attempts to attack in different directions; the losses that Ukraine is suffering today are crucial, not critical, but crucial.”
