Putin lays out options for Wagner soldiers in national address

Moscow, Russia | Xinhua | In a national address on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged Wagner forces to relocate to Belarus if they wanted, sign a contract with Russia’s Defence Ministry, or return to their families.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Russian intelligence services were investigating whether Western spy agencies played a role in the aborted mutiny, the TASS news agency reported.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States and its NATO allies were not involved in the incident and Washington would not take sides in the “internal matter” of Russia.

OPTIONS FOR WAGNER SOLDIERS

“We knew that the vast majority of the fighters and commanders of the Wagner group are also Russian patriots, devoted to their people and state,” Putin said in his address to Russian citizens Monday night, stressing that they were simply used (by some people) without their knowledge during the armed mutiny.

The president noted that the mutiny organizers betrayed the country and those who followed them and “an armed rebellion would have been suppressed in any case.”

He urged the soldiers of the Wagner group to sign a contract with the country’s defense ministry, return home or go to Belarus.

Meanwhile, Putin thanked “all servicemen, law enforcement officers, special services who stood in the way of the rebels.”

He also thanked Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for his mediating role in resolving the attempted mutiny.

Local reports said on Monday that a criminal case against Yevgeny Prigozhin — head of the Wagner private military group — for organizing an armed mutiny has not been closed.

“The criminal case against Prigozhin has not been closed. The investigation continues,” Sputnik reported, citing a source in the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office.

DISCLAIMER FROM U.S.

Biden declared that the United States and its allies were not involved.

“We made clear we were not involved, we had nothing to do with this,” Biden said on Monday in his first comments on the Wagner incident.

Biden said he spoke with key allies in a video conference to make sure everyone was “on the same page” and coordinated in their response.

While stressing his team would continue assessing the fallout from the incident, Biden said: “It’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going.”

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said the United States does not know the details of the deal reached between Putin and Prigozhin that ended the mutiny, nor did he know Prigozhin’s whereabouts.

“We’re not taking sides in this internal matter,” he said.

Biden, who spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, said he would also talk to the latter again soon to make sure they were “on the same page.”

Zelensky on Monday travelled to the front line running through the eastern Donetsk region to hand out decorations to troops near the occupied city of Bakhmut, his office said.

COUNTERTERRORISM REGIME IN MOSCOW LIFTED

On Saturday, Russia’s National Anti-terrorism Committee announced that a counter-terrorist operation regime was introduced in Moscow city, the Moscow region and the Voronezh region to prevent possible terrorist acts after the Wagner private military group was accused of trying to organize an armed rebellion.

After Moscow and Prigozhin reached a compromise through the mediation of Lukashenko, the committee declared on Monday that the legal regime of the counter-terrorist operation had been canceled in the above-mentioned places due to normalization of the situation. ■