MOSCOW: In a speech to the Russian nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin excoriated the organizers of the Wagner rebellion by calling them “traitors.”
The Russian leader said the organizers lied to their own people and “pushed them to death, under fire, to shoot their own,” deflecting Wagner fighters’ culpability for storming the southern city of Rostov, which they temporarily seized on their way toward Moscow.
Putin invited the Wagner soldiers and their commanders, whom he called “patriots,” to join the Russian military by signing with the Russian Ministry of Defense or with other law enforcement agencies.
He also gave them the option if they wanted to go back to their families and friends or to move to Belarus should they choose.
The Russian leader made no mention of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led the revolt.
However, he said the organizers of this rebellion betrayed “their country, their people, betrayed those who were drawn into the crime.”
He also said that through this revolt, the organizers gave Russian enemies what they wanted — “Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that military personnel and civilians would die, so that in the end Russia would lose … choke in a bloody civil strife.”
Putin also said he had deliberately let Saturday’s 24-hour mutiny by the Wagner militia go on as long as it did to avoid bloodshed, and that it had reinforced national unity.
“Time was needed, among other things, to give those who had made a mistake a chance to come to their senses, to realize that their actions were firmly rejected by society, and that the adventure in which they had been involved had tragic and destructive consequences for Russia and for our state,” he said.
Prigozhin on Monday made his first public comments since the brief rebellion he launched against Russia’s military leadership.
“We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government,” he said in an 11-minute audio message released on the Telegram messaging app.
Instead, Prigozhin said, he called his actions “a march to justice” triggered by a deadly attack on his private, Kremlin-linked military outfit by the Russian military.
“We started our march because of an injustice,” the Wagner chief said, claiming that the Russian military had attacked a Wagner camp with missiles and then helicopters, killing about 30 of its men. Russia denied attacking the camp.
Putin met Monday evening with the head of Russia’s main domestic security service, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other ministers, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the Interfax news agency reported.
(VOA)
Comment