Wagner chief vows revenge on Moscow: what we know so far

• The head of the Wagner mercenary group claims to have seized control of all military sites in the city of Rostov-on-Don and demanded that Russia’s military leadership come to him after accusing them of killing his forces. In videos posted on social media early on Saturday, Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed he was at the headquarters of the southern military district (SMD) in Rostov and demanded the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, come to the city, 1,000km (600 miles) south of Moscow. The videos could not be verified.

• The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said he will do “everything possible to defend my country”. In a televised address he said “armed mutiny” by the Wagner group was treason, and that anyone who had taken up arms against the Russian military would be punished. He said “decisive action” would be taken to stabilise the situation in Rostov-on-Don.

• Kyiv has liberated territories near the city of Krasnohorivka in Donetsk region, which have been occupied by pro-Russia separatists since 2014, during the Wagner mutiny in Russia, according to Ukrainian agencies.

• The governor of Russia’s Lipetsk province says the Wagner mercenary group has entered the region, AP reports. The Lipetsk region is about 360km (225 miles) south of Moscow and much closer to the capital than Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner forces appeared during the night.

• There have been numerous reports that Vladimir Putin’s presidential plane took off from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport at 2.16pm local time (12.16 BST) and then headed north-west. It has not been possible to confirm whether Putin was on the plane and his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has told the Tass news agency the president is “working in the Kremlin”.

• Large amounts of cash were found during a raid on Prigozhin’s office, he has reportedly confirmed. Russian media had reported that money was found at the St Petersburg address, something Prigozhin has now confirmed, according to Reuters.

• The UK government held an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss the situation in Russia.

• The Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said anti-terrorist measures were being taken in the Russian capital, including additional checks on roads, to reinforce security. Authorities also said the M4 motorway, connecting Moscow with the south, was closed to traffic at the border with the Voronezh region due to the movement of a military convoy.

• Russia’s FSB security service has opened a criminal case for armed mutiny against Prigozhin after the mercenary chief accused the Russian military of targeting his forces and vowed to “destroy” his rivals. In an extraordinary series of audio clips released late on Friday, Prigozhin claimed that a rocket attack in the Russian region of Rostov had killed scores of his fighters, vowing to take “revenge” and “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of the country”.

• The FSB said Prigozhin’s statements and actions were “in fact a call to start an armed civil conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation and a stab in the back to Russian servicemen fighting pro-fascist Ukrainian forces”. It urged Wagner fighters “not to make irreparable mistakes, to stop any forceful actions against the Russian people, not to carry out the criminal and treacherous orders of Prigozhin, and to take measures to detain him”.

• Early on Saturday, Prigozhin released another voice message in which he claimed without offering any evidence that his forces had left Ukraine and were entering the southern Russian city of Rostov. “Right now we have crossed all the border points … The border guards greeted us and hugged our fighters. Now we are entering Rostov,” he said. “If anyone gets in our way, we will destroy everything … We extend our hand to everyone. We move forward, we are going all the way!”

• Gen Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s Ukraine campaign, released a video address ordering the mercenaries to remain loyal to Putin. “I urge you to stop,” said Surovikin, who was previously understood to be close to Prigozhin. “The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country.”

• Earlier on Friday, Prigozhin accused Moscow’s leadership of lying to the public about the justifications for invading Ukraine. He dismissed Moscow’s claims that Kyiv was planning to launch an offensive on the Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine in February 2022. “There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of 24 February,” Prigozhin said. “The ministry of defence is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole Nato block.”

• A senior aide to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described Prigozhin’s actions as a “counter-terrorist operation” and said that “everything is just beginning in Russia”. “The split between the elites is too obvious. Agreeing and pretending that everything is settled won’t work,” Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted. “Someone must definitely lose: either Prigozhin … or the collective ‘anti-Prygozhin’.”

• The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces has confirmed for the first time that the main force of his offensive reserve is yet to be committed into battle with Russia, saying: “Everything is still ahead.” In an exclusive interview with the Guardian from a military base in east Ukraine, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi said the Russian general staff had anticipated where Ukraine’s forces were at their most dangerous but issued a warning to the Kremlin that he was hunting down the lethal weakness in their lines.