June 28, 2023

1. Putin’s addressed to the nation several times

Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered a choice to the soldiers of the Wagner PMC involved in Saturday's failed armed rebellion. They can either sign a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry or other security agencies, return home or move to neighboring Belarus, the Russian leader said in a televised addressed broadcasted in the evening on June 26.

"The overwhelming majority of the fighters and commanders of the Wagner group are also Russian patriots, devoted to their people and country. They proved this with their courage on the battlefield,” Putin noted.

The organizers of the insurrection “kept them in the dark and tried using them against their brothers in arms, with whom they fought shoulder to shoulder for the sake of the country and its future,” he said.

The Russian leader thanked the Wagner soldiers and commanders, who “stopped at the last line” and didn’t allow the “fratricidal bloodshed” to take place. He added that the promise he gave during negotiations to settle the crisis will be kept.

On June 27 Vladimir Putin also addressed to units of the Defense Ministry, Russian Guard, Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service and Federal Protection Service.

Russian military and its law enforcement agencies prevented a major internal armed conflict in the country last week, President Vladimir Putin has said, referring to the aborted rebellion by Wagner PMC. “In fact, you have stopped a civil war, acting precisely and cohesively,” he told a group of service members, who gathered at the Kremlin to receive state decorations for their endeavors. The response of the people, on whom Russia’s security depends, enabled all critical defenses and government systems to continue operating, the president said. President noted that no units had been pulled back from the frontline of the military operation in Ukraine.

2. Minsk will determine the algorithm on NW use from Belarus

Addressing the Belarusian military on June 27 Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko said that he gave instructions to the MoD, General Staff and the KGB determine national algorithm for Russian TNW use from Belarus. He also noted that Wagner PMC would not guard the TNW storage sites in Belarus.

Dealing with that group armed mutiny he observed that Russia would have prevailed in a standoff against the mutineers, but it might have resulted in “thousands” of deaths, so a peaceful solution was the priority. “The most dangerous thing… was not the situation itself but its potential consequences,” he stressed.

Aleksandr Lukashenko said Vladimir Putin told him the Wagner PMC founder, Evgeny Prigozhin, was refusing to talk to anyone and that attempting to negotiate with him would be “useless”. Nonetheless, Lukashenko apparently managed to establish contact, with the help of the Russian Federal Security Service.

Prigozhin was in a state of “total euphoria” for the first 30 minutes, and they were speaking mostly in obscenities, the Belarusian leader admitted. “There were 10 times more swear words than normal ones,” he recalled.

During their talks, Lukashenko said he warned Prigozhin that he would be “crushed like a bug” should he dare to continue his march on Moscow.

At 5pm Moscow time during the mutiny, Prigozhin called to say he would accept Lukashenko’s terms, but demanded security guarantees for himself and his fighters. At that point, Lukashenko contacted FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and agreed with him that Russia would not strike Wagner troops. Lukashenko “promised” Prigozhin this would not happen and offered a “guarantee” that he would accept Wagner fighters in Belarus and ensure their safety.

3. Lavrov: The USA supports regime change in Russia

The US enthusiastically supports regime change whenever it can benefit from the process, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT. If a protest movement targets a government more pliant to American interests, Washington will inevitably reject it, the diplomat added.

There have been numerous attempts at regime change around the world in recent years and they were “met with a different response on the part of the US, depending on who was in power and who was trying to carry out the coup,” Lavrov said in an interview on June 26.

“Where the West is happy with the current government, in such situations no protest can be legitimate. But where the government doesn’t reflect the interests of the hegemon and is pursuing the national interests, in those cases we see various unlawful forces are being stimulated [to attack the authorities],” the diplomat added.

An example of such a differentiated approach by the US and its allies was the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 and the conflict in Yemen the next year, Lavrov pointed out. The so-called Maidan coup in Kiev was a “revolt that happened against the legitimate president” and which was marred by “bloody provocations against the unarmed police,” he said. 

Ukraine’s democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovich had been forced to flee violence despite his government and the opposition reaching an EU-sponsored agreement on settling the crisis just hours before that, the diplomat recalled.    “There were no protests against that insurgency from the US or its European allies. So, they just recognized it as a zig-zag in the democratic process,” he said.

The top Russian diplomat also said there was an attempted coup in Gambia in 2014 and “the White House announced that the US will never recognize the forces that seized power in the country by unconstitutional means.” 

Lavrov also mentioned some of the more recent events when the Americans and their allies outright rejected protests against the “puppet” government of Maria Sandu in Moldova, but fully backed the demonstrations by the supporters of former president Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, where the West “doesn’t like the current government.”

4. CNN: Washington expected more bloodshed from Wagner mutiny

US officials anticipated stronger resistance from regular Russian troops during the aborted coup, the network reported. The US expected more resistance to the coup attempt by the Wagner private military company as Evgeny Prigozhin advanced on Moscow, a source has told CNN, predicting that the aborted insurrection would be “a lot more a bloody one than it was.”

The intelligence community in Washington claimed to have had advance information about Prigozhin’s actions, according to reports in the US media, and also believed it would result in greater bloodshed.

Written by Vladimir P. Kozin