Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin on said Monday that his attempted insurrection was intended to be a political demonstration and claimed the move had wide backing from the Russian public.
Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion against
Russian military leadership signals strains within Russia and raises concerns
about the country’s leadership as Moscow continues its war on Ukraine,
officials and analysts say.
Prigozhin on Friday launched fighters in an
armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister, accusing Sergei
Shoigu of ordering a strike on the mercenary group’s field camps as they fought
for Russia in Ukraine.
His fighters reached the location of Russia’s
southern military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and began moving toward Moscow,
but the Wagner chief Saturday ordered his forces to stop the advance.
Putin “put down the rebellion, but at great
cost,” former United States Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said Monday on
“CBS Mornings.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday
that the rebellion shows “cracks in the Russian facade” amid Russia’s 16-month
war on its neighbor.
“Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were on
the doorstep of Kyiv, in Ukraine, thinking they’d take the city in a matter of
days, thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country.
Now, over this weekend, they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against
mercenaries of Putin’s own making,” Blinken said.
Blinken said the rebellion “presents a real
distraction” for Putin that could “create greater openings for the Ukrainians
to do well on the ground” as they mount their their counteroffensive efforts.
Prigozhin “has raised profound questions
about the very premises for Russian aggression against Ukraine in the first
place,” Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Wagner chief challenged
Putin’s justification for Moscow’s ongoing war on its neighbor that the
invasion was necessary to denazify and demilitarize the country.
Prigozhin, meanwhile, said Monday that his
attempted insurrection was intended to be a political demonstration and claimed
the move had wide backing from the Russian public.
“We started our march because of injustice,”
Prigozhin said in a new audio file released on his Telegram channel. “We did
not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime illegally.”
Prigozhin, whose mercenary fighters captured
a southern Russian city and military base Saturday before halting an advance
just more than 100 miles from Moscow, said his “march of justice” was in
response to corruption and bureaucracy.
He said Russian citizens met him and his
fighters with Russian flags and emblems of the Wagner Group.
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