The mercenaries of the Russian Wagner group withdrew this Sunday, after the 24-hour rebellion orchestrated by their leader, Yevgueni Prigozhin, who will leave Russia under the agreement that President Vladimir Putin had to accept, weakened after this unprecedented crisis.
Prigozhin will go to Belarus, according to the Russian presidency, with no word yet on Sunday when he will leave Russia. He has not revealed where the head of the militias is currently located.
In a 24-hour operation that brought his men less than 400 km from Moscow, Prigozhin frontally challenged the authority of the Russian president, before backing down and ordering his fighters to return to their bases, after mediation by the president. Belarusian, Alexander Lukashenko, the Kremlin’s only ally in Europe.
The mercenaries were withdrawing from the Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine, local authorities said on Sunday, assuring that everything was taking place “without incident.”
They also left the Lipetsk region, south of Moscow.
However, in and around the Russian capital, the “anti-terrorist operation regime”, established the day before as a result of the riot, was still in force on Sunday.
Impressive police patrols remained deployed along the main highway leading out of Moscow, in the south of the capital, an AFP journalist noted.
In the Moscow region, traffic restrictions on the highway linking Moscow with Rostov (southwest), the nerve center of Russian operations in Ukraine, were also still in force on Sunday, according to Avtodor, in charge of highways in Russia.
In Moscow, Monday will be a holiday, decreed on Saturday by the mayor of the city, Sergei Sobyanin, in the face of a “difficult” situation.
Prigozhin announced on Saturday night that he was ending the rebellion, which had begun a day earlier in Rostov, to avoid a “bloodbath.”
In accordance with the agreement reached with Lukashenko, Wagner’s leader will be able to go to Belarus and avoid being prosecuted in Russia, like his fighters, taking into account the Ukrainian “merits at the front” of the paramilitary group, said the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
Wagner’s troops victorious
The paramilitary group has played a key role alongside the Russian army in the offensive in Ukraine.
The Russian authorities have never shown such a lenient attitude towards their detractors, especially in a context of relentless repression against Putin’s opponents and critics and the operation against Ukraine.
For Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak, “Prigozhin humiliated Putin/the state and demonstrated that there is no longer a legitimate monopoly on violence” in Russia.
“The Kremlin is now confronted with a deeply unstable balance (…) Prigozhin’s rebellion reveals serious weaknesses,” says an analyst at the US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
In Rostov, dozens of people cheered the paramilitaries on Saturday night, chanting “Wagner, Wagner!”, as they left the city, with their chief leading the convoy.
“The crisis of institutions and of trust were not evident to many in Russia and in the West. Today it is clear,” says Konstantin Kalachev, an independent Russian political scientist. “The way the Rostov population showed itself at the Wagner exit says a lot,” he notes.
“Treason”
Although the terms of the agreement remain unknown, it appears that President Lukashenko, a Putin ally, played a crucial role. According to his office, he is the one who got Wagner’s boss to stop his advance on Moscow.
The Kremlin appreciated the initiative of the Belarusian president.
Faced with this riot by his biggest challenge since coming to power more than two decades ago, Putin denounced a “treason” and warned of the risk of “civil war.”
The United States and its Western allies, which support Ukraine, closely followed the development of the crisis.
According to the Washington Post and the New York Times, US intelligence services had alerted the White House to the imminence of Wagner’s rebellion a day before it broke out.
“The myth of the unity of Putin’s Russia is over,” Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said. “This internal escalation splits the Russian military alliance,” he added to the daily Il Messaggero.
Russian diplomacy warned Western powers on Saturday against any attempt to “take advantage” of this rebellion to further their anti-Russian purposes, amid conflict in Ukraine.
Moscow also assured that this mutiny would not affect its offensive.
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang received Russian Vice Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko in Beijing on Sunday, the Chinese government said, the first public meeting between diplomats from both countries after the Wagner mutiny.
And North Korea expressed strong support for Russia to “successfully” end the rebellion.