Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the military and law enforcement on Tuesday, thanking them for having “avoided a civil war” in the failed rebellion carried out by the Wagner Group.
In a speech addressed to the Kremlin security forces in Moscow, quoted by the official Russian news agencies, Putin assured, on the other hand, that neither the regular army nor the Russian population supported the armed rebellion.
“Those who got involved in the rebellion saw that the army and the people were not on their side,” Putin said, adding that the work of security forces on Saturday “prevented the situation from developing extremely dangerous.”
After calling for a minute’s silence in memory of the Russian servicemen killed during the uprising, Putin paid tribute to the army pilots killed by the mutineers as they “did their duty with honour.”
“Together with his brothers in arms, he opposed these riots, the result of which would inevitably have been chaos. In fact, he prevented a civil war,” Putin declared.
The Russian president assured that no Russian soldiers involved in the special military operation in Ukraine were sent back to Russia to stop the rebellion.
“We did not have to withdraw combat units from the ‘special military operation’ area,” he stressed.
At the same time, in the usual morning press conference, the spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov, denied that the Russian president had been weakened by the failure of the Wagner Group rebellion, which caused the worst crisis in Russia since the arrival of Vladimir Putin. to power power for more than 20 years.
“We do not agree” with these analyses, he said, referring to “empty discussions” that “have nothing to do with reality.”
“These events showed the extent to which society is consolidating around the president,” Peskov said.
On Monday, Putin had already thanked those responsible for state security for the work carried out during the Wagner Group rebellion, at the beginning of a meeting with the country’s main military and security leaders.
“I joined you in this meeting to thank you for the work you have done in recent days and to discuss the situation,” Putin said at the start of the meeting, a short segment of which was broadcast on television.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu participated in this “working meeting”, but not the chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, two declared enemies of the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Wagner Group mercenaries carried out a 24-hour armed rebellion over the weekend, led by Prigozhin, during which they seized the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced up to 200 kilometers from Moscow.
The rebellion ended with an agreement brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, which, according to the Kremlin, establishes that Prigozhin go into exile in Belarus, in exchange for immunity for himself and his mercenaries.
In a statement to the nation, broadcast today on television, Putin proposed to the mercenaries the possibility of staying in Russia and enlisting in the army, or leaving for Belarus.
Source: TSF
