The mutiny by caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary army ended on Saturday before it really began. Prigozhin apparently has been persuaded to desist by Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, who agreed to let him move to his country, presumably with part of his fighting force. But his escapade’s consequences have only begun to resound in Moscow and on the battlefields of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Though Vladimir Putin declared Prigozhin a traitor in a five-minute televised address to the nation, characteristically without naming him, Prigozhin’s “Justice March” faced little resistance. The rebels passed through the Rostov and Voronezh regions, shooting down several military helicopters that tried to follow or attack their convoys, including a Ka-52 — a fearsome machine that has been slowing Ukraine’s counteroffensive. They passed through the Lipetsk region, where local officials ordered some roads dug up to stop them — too late. They approached the Oka River in the Moscow region, 200 kilometers from the capital, as sandbags were heaped at checkpoints and roadblocks manned by a thin force of police and conscripts closer to the capital. Meanwhile, Chechen fighters who had professed loyalty to Putin and offered to put down the mutiny in Rostov apparently never showed up.
Suddenly it was all over. Using his standard mode of communication — a voice recording on Telegram — Prigozhin announced that he was ending the march on Moscow to avoid bloodshed and pulling back his fighters to their field camps. Soon, Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov explained that Lukashenko had negotiated a solution at Putin’s request: Prigozhin would receive immunity from prosecution and move to Belarus, and some Wagner fighters would sign contracts with the defense ministry. In Lipetsk, workers began filling the holes they had dug in the roads. In Moscow, the mayor decided not to cancel the day off he’d declared for Muscovites for Monday when he still expected things to get hot.
