The Kremlin said Saturday that rebel Wagner paramilitary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin has agreed to leave Moscow for Belarus and a criminal case against him will be dropped.
Wagner members will not be prosecuted, a Kremlin spokesman said. “We have always respected their heroic deeds at the front.”
The Kremlin also said the deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin was made to avoid bloodshed.
On why it struck the deal with Wagner, Kremlin said, “Avoiding bloodshed, internal confrontation, and clashes with unpredictable results was the highest goal”, noting that mediation by Belarus was aimed at achieving that goal.
“We are turning our columns around and going back to field camps,” Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced after vowing to march on Moscow to topple the military leadership. He said he understood the importance of the moment and did not want to “spill Russian blood.”
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has thanked his Belarus counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko for brokering the deal with the Russian rebel group leader, Prigozhin.
Recall that Belarusian leader, Lukashenko said Saturday he had negotiated with Wagner chief, Prigozhin an end to the movement of his mercenary troops inside Russia in order to deescalate the situation.
The rebel Wagner mercenary force threatened to march on Moscow on Saturday before announcing a stunning pull-back, as Kyiv seized on the chaos to launch new assaults against Russian positions in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that an armed insurrection launched by members of the rebel Wagner mercenary group was evidence of Russia’s inherent political instability.
Meanwhile, spokesman for Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov said the crisis would not affect Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine.
He said it was “out of the question” that Wagner’s aborted rebellion would impact Russia’s campaign against Kyiv.
Earlier, the chief of the rebel Wagner mercenary force called off his troops’ advance toward Moscow on Saturday, easing Russia back from its most serious security crisis in decades.
By early Sunday, after Prigozhin’s about-face, the Wagner group pulled fighters from Russia’s Rostov-on-Don. But before they left, residents cheered “Wagner! Wagner!” outside the military headquarters the mercenaries had captured.
(Sourced from several media reports)
