Russia on Saturday appeared to have averted an immediate descent into civil war after mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said he would order his Wagner fighters to end their march on Moscow and return to their bases in southern Russia.
At the end of an extraordinary day, during which a visibly angry Vladimir Putin had made an emergency television broadcast railing against the “deadly threat to our state”, Prigozhin said that he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood and would order his troops back to their bases instead.
“Now the moment has come when blood can be shed,” he said. “Therefore, realising all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed from one side, we will turn our convoys around and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.”
The decision followed negotiations with the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and the Kremlin announced later on Saturday night that Prigozhin would move to Belarus under a deal to end what was in effect the country’s first armed coup in decades.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the criminal case that had been opened against Prigozhin for armed mutiny would be dropped, and the Wagner fighters who had taken part in his “march for justice” would not face any action in recognition of their previous service to Russia.
The Kremlin had earlier been forced to mobilise its forces and prepare defences as Prigozhin sent a convoy of armed troops towards Moscow.
Officials dug anti-tank ditches into federal highways, erected machine-gun emplacements at the city limits, and deployed infantry fighting vehicles on the streets of Moscow, while Putin vowed that the Russian state would deal brutally with its largest armed insurrection since the fall of the Soviet Union.
As the mercenaries’ convoy headed towards the capital, Moscow residents were urged by the city’s mayor to stay at home. Sergei Sobyanin said that Monday would be a “non-working day” in order to “minimise risks”.
The convoy of lorries, infantry fighting vehicles and other military hardware had been hoping to take advantage of the element of surprise and reach Moscow before it was intercepted by a larger detachment of Russian regular troops, according to analysts and military bloggers.
Putin appeared on television earlier on Saturday in an emergency broadcast, issuing a nationwide call for unity in the face of a mutinous strike that he compared to the revolution of 1917.
“Any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state, to us as a nation,” he said.
Prigozhin, the Putin ally who had amassed power and influence as the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, had declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defence, seizing the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shooting down three military helicopters in what he called a “march of justice”.
Armed by the Kremlin to fight in Ukraine, the maverick warlord was now redirecting his forces at his enemies inside Russia in the most serious threat to the Kremlin since the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt.
In his televised address on Saturday morning, Putin said “the fate of our people is being decided”, accusing the Wagner group of “armed mutiny” and vowing to “neutralise” the uprising.
“It’s an attempt to subvert us from inside. This is treason in the face of those who are fighting on the front,” Putin told the Russian public. “This is a stab in the back of our troops and the people of Russia.” The response, he promised, would be “brutal”.
In videos posted on social media early on Saturday, Prigozhin, who late on Friday vowed to take revenge against the Kremlin’s military leadership, said he was at the headquarters of the southern military district (SMD) in Rostov-on-Don and demanded the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, come to the city, 1,000km south of Moscow.
In a bizarre scene, Prigozhin appeared alongside two senior Russian generals who appeared to have been forced to film a video with him as he demanded that the top brass come down to Rostov for negotiations.
“We have arrived here; we want to receive the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” Prigozhin said in one video. “Unless they come, we’ll be here; we’ll blockade the city of Rostov and head for Moscow.”
In Ukraine, where three people in Kyiv were killed in Russian airstrikes overnight, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, commented: “Everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself. Whoever throws hundreds of thousands into the war, eventually must barricade himself in the Moscow region from those whom he himself armed.”
In the UK, a Cobra security meeting was called and in Estonia, which neighbours Russia, the prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said there was strengthened security on the border.
Putin, meanwhile, sought to calm jittery allies, speaking with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Officials in Moscow were said to have been blindsided by Prigozhin’s betrayal and declaration of war on the defence ministry. “It’s real shock and hysteria, nobody understands what to do,” a former defence ministry official told the Observer, citing his conversations with former colleagues. For the first time on Saturday he also directly criticised Putin, saying the Russian leader had been “deeply mistaken” in calling him a traitor.
Prigozhin claimed to have seized the SMD headquarters “without firing a shot”. Automatic gunfire and several explosions were heard later in the day in Rostov-on-Don, as Wagner sought to dig in by laying mines and establishing checkpoints in the city centre.
Prigozhin’s forces appeared to have taken the military by surprise. “It’s still early,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Asian news channel CNA. “They took advantage of a situation where there was probably confusion and a lack of orders.”
Late on Friday, Prigozhin claimed a Russian rocket attack had killed scores of his fighters, and he vowed to take “revenge” and “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of the country”. In a virtual declaration of war against his rivals in Russia’s military, Prigozhin said he controlled 25,000 fighters and together “we are going to figure out why the chaos is happening in the country”.
“Anyone who wants should join. We need to end this mess,” he said.
Russian security services moved swiftly against the Wagner boss, denouncing Prigozhin for “treachery” and ordering the mercenary group’s fighters to detain their commander. They raided a Wagner headquarters in St Petersburg on Saturday, seizing boxes of cash estimated at £37m. On Saturday morning, Prigozhin was seen meeting Russia’s deputy defence minister and the deputy head of the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence directorate. In the clip, Pirgozhin said he planned to march on to Moscow, adding that he had shot down three Russian helicopters that tried to resist him.
Several senior Russian officials called on the country to unite behind Putin. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, urged Russians to rally around the president, while the head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, led a prayer for Putin. Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya who is a powerful ally of Putin, called Prigozhin a traitor and said he was sending Chechen troops to squash the mutiny.
On Saturday afternoon, Prigozhin had looked isolated, with several former military allies denouncing his rebellion. But his troops appeared to have taken Rostov without any resistance and questions will rise over the military’s loyalty.
Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R Politik, said: “It is tough to gauge current loyalties at the moment. I am confident that the military hierarchy stands with the government, and there won’t be any switching of allegiances. Yet lower in the ranks it’s a different story. If orders to open fire are issued, how will individual soldiers react?”
Britain’s defence ministry said on Saturday that the Russian state was facing its greatest security challenge of recent times, after the move by Wagner group mercenary forces towards Moscow.
“Over the coming hours, the loyalty of Russia’s security forces, and especially the Russian National Guard, will be key to how this crisis plays out,” it said in a regular intelligence update.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy, said the events in Moscow showed that the “Ukrainian counteroffensive finally destabilised the Russian elites, intensifying the internal split that arose after the defeat in Ukraine.”
