Yevgeny Prigozhin broke his silence Monday for the first time since leading an armed rebellion, saying he wasn’t trying to oust Vladimir Putin’s government but would keep his Wagner mercenary company going despite official efforts to shut it down.
The march on Moscow by Wagner troops to within 124 miles of the capital on Saturday was a protest aimed at bringing to account those responsible for “enormous mistakes” in Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as to prevent the “destruction” of his mercenary group by officials, Prigozhin said Monday in an 11-minute audio message on his press service’s Telegram channel.
“We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legitimately elected government,” he said, stopping short of openly pledging his loyalty to the Russian president.
There was no immediate response from the Kremlin, which has sought in public to put the dramatic upheaval behind it. State television showed footage earlier Monday of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu — the main target of Prigozhin’s attacks on the handling of the war — meeting commanders.
The conflicting signals only added to the mystery surrounding the weekend’s events, which were the biggest public challenge to Putin’s authority in his more than two decades in office. The Russian president hasn’t appeared in public since early Saturday when he denounced the revolt as “treason” in a TV address to the nation and threatened “harsh” punishment that never transpired.
Instead, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal for Prigozhin to end the revolt in return for Putin allowing him to travel to Belarus and dropping criminal mutiny charges against the Wagner leader and his fighters.
But Monday, state media reported that the criminal case against Prigozhin opened at the start of the crisis still hasn’t been closed. Lawyers said the process can sometimes take time, but in a country where Putin’s word is law, the delay raises questions about the fate of the deal that was reached to defuse the uprising.
In his latest audio message, the mercenary chief pointedly noted the expressions of public support he said his fighters enjoyed as they marched through Russia’s heartland. “Civilians were happy to see us,” he said.
Prigozhin also continued his criticism of top security officials, noting that his fighters had been able to advance about 480 miles into Russia over 24 hours, blockading military units along the way without significant resistance.
“Our ‘march of justice’ showed many of the things we’ve talked about earlier, the serious problems with security on the whole territory of the country,” he said. Its lightning progress was also a “master class” for how the military should have pursued its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he added.
He accused the Defense Ministry of seeking to destroy Wagner with an order requiring his fighters sign up with the military by July 1. Lukashenko had offered to allow Wagner to continue operating in Belarus, he said.
“Though he retreated, Prigozhin is now a figure of a totally different scale,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik, a political consultant, wrote. “Putin will have to do something about this, balancing the risks of a potentially negative reaction from his followers and those who support him.”
Prigozhin didn’t say in his recording where he was. He was last seen publicly leaving the southern city of Rostov-on-Don with his fighters as they withdrew amid cheers from the public late Saturday. Putin gave his “personal guarantee” that Prigozhin would be allowed to leave for Belarus, the Kremlin said over the weekend.
The rapid chain of events has left the U.S., Europe and China puzzling over the political fallout from a rebellion that shattered Putin’s invincible image as Russia’s leader and spiraled into the greatest threat to his nearly quarter-century rule. The crisis highlighted bitter divisions within Russia over the faltering war in Ukraine that’s the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II, as a Ukrainian counteroffensive continues to try to push Putin’s forces out of occupied territories.
There’s “an internal power struggle in Russia and we will not get involved,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told reporters Monday as European Union foreign ministers gathered for a scheduled meeting in Luxembourg. “We are seeing that Russia’s leadership is increasingly fighting within itself.”
U.S. President Joe Biden said it was still too early to determine the impact of the revolt.
“We’re going to keep assessing the fallout of this weekend’s events and the implications for Russia and Ukraine. It is still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where it is going,” he said in his first public remarks on the mutiny, during a White House event Monday.
Earlier Monday, Putin spoke by phone with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who each expressed support for the Russian leader’s actions, the Kremlin said.
China, which has boosted ties with Putin and refused to join U.S.-led sanctions over the war, said it supports Russia’s actions to maintain national stability. A brief Foreign Ministry statement described the weekend’s events as Moscow’s “internal affair.”
Putin has been “seriously damaged,” former U.K. Ambassador to Moscow Laurie Bristow said in a Bloomberg TV interview Monday in which he compared the Russian state to a tank of piranhas. “As long as the food is coming, the piranhas are happy and when the food stops, the piranhas eat each other up,” he said.
Market reaction to the turmoil was muted. The ruble weakened as much as 3% against the dollar at Monday’s open on the Moscow Exchange, before recovering most of the losses, and wheat futures advanced.
The potential arrival of Prigozhin and his mercenaries in Belarus may create a new threat to the country and the safety of neighboring NATO member states like Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told Bloomberg TV in an interview Monday. He may get involved in training Russian troops or even join another attack on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, she said.
“Prigozhin’s story is not over,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “He will be trying to challenge Putin again, and I don’t want Belarus to get involved.”
———
(Arne Delfs contributed to this story.)
