The justification for this rebellion appeared urgent and spontaneous – an apparent air strike on a Wagner camp in the forest, which the Russian Ministry of Defense has denied – appeared hours after a remarkable dissection of the rationale behind the war by Prigozhin. It is likely however Wagner’s units planned some of this for a while. But what we have seen – with Putin forced to admit that Rostov-on-Don, his main military hub, is out of his control – puts paid to any idea that this was managed by the Kremlin. So accustomed are we to viewing Putin as a master tactician, that the opening salvos of Prigozhin’s disobedience were at times assessed as a feint – a bid by Putin to keep his generals on edge with a loyal henchman as their outspoken critic. The rage and tension that has been building for months has not suddenly been assuaged. Will he pardon Prigozhin, and his fighters, or retract his statement about “inevitable punishment” for “blackmail and terrorist methods?” Does he make changes in the defense elite to placate Wagner’s head? What does all of this say to the Russian military, elite and people about who is really in charge of the country? And the lasting damage done to Putin by this armed insurrection will be compounded by some key decisions the Kremlin head must now make. ![]() More details of how this came to be will emerge. ![]() And it took the intervention of Lukashenko, an ally whom Putin treats more as a subordinate than an equal, to engineer an end to this ghastly of weekends for the Kremlin. He has done incalculable damage to Putin’s control over the Russian state, and shown how easy it is to take control of the key military city of Rostov-on-Don and then move fast towards the capital. The top brass of Russia’s defense ministry is still in place. Prigozhin appears – thus far – to have had none of his demands heeded. Much of this sudden resolution is as curious and inexplicable as the crisis it solved. ![]() At the time of writing, 24 hours of extraordinary shark-jumping culminated with Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin agreeing to reverse his advance to within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of Moscow’s city limits and send his columns back to “field camps, according to the plan.” It is a last-minute reversal intended, he said, to avoid “bloodshed.” Shortly before this audio statement, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko apparently contacted Prigozhin, with the permission of Putin, to negotiate this remarkable climbdown, according to a statement from Belarusian officials and Russian state media reports.
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