As forces from Wagner occupied key buildings in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don in Russia on Saturday, some local residents met them as heroes, bringing them water and sweets even as Russian president Vladimir Putin decried their armed insurrection as a “stab in the back”.
“Finally, we can welcome them home,” said Evgeny, 36, a supporter of the war who has been among those crowdfunding and ferrying goods into occupied Ukraine. “The army has been fighting incorrectly from the beginning and they put too much [pressure] on these guys. In Bakhmut, everywhere. And you see what happens? Our own army is trying to stop us from winning this war.”
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who essentially launched a coup targeting the defence ministry before later calling off the action, was acting “totally correctly”, he said. “I hope he wins.”
Videos from the city showed soldiers in full tactical gear being feted by locals taking selfies with infantry fighting vehicles, shaking hands and otherwise adapting to the new reality in a Russian city in effect occupied by the country’s largest paramilitary force.
Evgeny, like others, said the situation in the city was “calm, but tense”, but said that the armed men, who likely include trained mercenaries and convicts recruited from prisons, were behaving “adequately”. Two other people in Rostov-on-Don contacted by the Observer said that they were “nervous” about the troops but that things were calm for now. They were worried about the potential for a clash with regular troops in the coming days.
On a busy street corner, Lyudmilla, a woman in a sundress, brought a packet of biscuits to a Wagner soldier standing guard outside a local municipal building. Another man brought the soldier a bottle of water.
“Why am I bringing food? Because we are kind people,” she said on camera. “It’s not just me doing it. People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers.”
But some locals reacted extremely negatively to the arrival of the Russian mercenaries. “Have some shame! Are you the protectors of our fatherland or not?” said one man pushing a bicycle past five Wagner fighters. “Why are you starting this mess here?”
Prigozhin, who has been cultivating the image of a populist who speaks truth to power, will need public support if he has any chance of surviving the aftermath of what Putin called his “internal mutiny” and “treason”.
“Why does the country support us? Because we have come with a march of justice,” Prigozhin said in a voice memo that he released on his Telegram account yesterday morning. “We have come without shooting, we haven’t touched a single conscript, we haven’t killed a single person … We took the headquarters in Rostov without firing a single shot.”
Gunfire and explosions could be heard around the military headquarters yesterday afternoon, as video showed a crowd of people at one point running away from the site. Other clashes have taken place on the city outskirts, and an oil depot in Voronezh was set alight. Prigozhin deployed some of his forces in a surprise raid towards Moscow, but later ordered them to halt “to avoid bloodshed”.
But overall, life in Rostov-on-Don continued somewhat normally. In the centre, a man played on an accordion, while locals milled past the armoured personnel carriers that Wagner had ridden in on. Other footage showed Wagner soldiers stocking up on supplies at the local supermarkets and buying lunch at the Russian version of McDonald’s.
Many others appeared angry about the soldiers’ arrival. “I’ve always admired you, why didn’t you go to Moscow?” one man asked a Wagner fighter as 20 other people looked on. “I always supported them as long as they were fighting.”
“I think everybody just wants calm, they want to be left alone,” said Dmitry, a driver from a small city near Rostov who visited the city on Saturday and saw the Wagner troops. “I can’t say many people really support them or not. They’re also angry about the war and how it is going.
“Most importantly people don’t want the city to become like Belgorod, like Shebekino,” he said.
Belgorod, a city further north, has been shelled several times in the course of the war, but life there largely goes on as normal. Shebekino, a town on the border with Ukraine, has largely been evacuated, as shelling and cross-border raids by anti-Kremlin militants have raised fears that the Kremlin can no longer defend its border cities.
