Prigozhin on Friday launched fighters in an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister, accusing Sergei Shoigu of ordering a strike on the mercenary group’s field camps as they fought for Russia in Ukraine.
Prigozhin’s fighters reached the location of Russia’s southern military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and began moving toward Moscow, but the Wagner chief Saturday ordered his forces to stop the advance.
He reportedly reached a deal with the Kremlin, with help from Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko, a key Putin ally, and has agreed to move to Belarus.
Putin “put down the rebellion, but at great cost,” former United States Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said Monday on “CBS Mornings.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the rebellion shows “cracks in the Russian facade” amid Russia’s 16-month war on its neighbor.
“Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv, in Ukraine, thinking they’d take the city in a matter of days, thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country. Now, over this weekend, they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making,” Blinken said.
Blinken said the rebellion “presents a real distraction” for Putin that could “create greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground” as they mount their their counteroffensive efforts.
Prigozhin “has raised profound questions about the very premises for Russian aggression against Ukraine in the first place,” Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Wagner chief challenged Putin’s justification for Moscow’s ongoing war on its neighbor that the invasion was necessary to denazify and demilitarize the country.
Prigozhin, meanwhile, said Monday that his attempted insurrection was intended to be a political demonstration and claimed the move had wide backing from the Russian public.
“We started our march because of injustice,” Prigozhin said in a new audio file released on his Telegram channel. “We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime illegally.”
Prigozhin, whose mercenary fighters captured a southern Russian city and military base Saturday before halting an advance just more than 100 miles from Moscow, said his “march of justice” was in response to corruption and bureaucracy.
He said Russian citizens met him and his fighters with Russian flags and emblems of the Wagner Group.
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
