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Prigozhin, early on Saturday, had railed angrily against Russia’s top regular military commanders. It was not immediately clear what deal, if any, he had made with Lukashenko; Belarusian state media reported that security guarantees for Wagner were “on the table.” But while Putin seemed to avert his greatest crisis in more than 23 years as Russia’s supreme political leader, the brief, armed rebellion presented the starkest evidence yet that his brutal invasion of Ukraine had backfired, leading to instability at home and exposing his growing isolation from reality and weakness as a leader.
Putin, in an emergency address to the nation, called the rebellion a “stab in the back” and “a betrayal,” promising tough action to stop the rebels, who he said were on a path to anarchy and division that threatened Russia’s hard-won military gains in Ukraine. Some Russian military officials predicted that the violent internal strife would set off celebrations in Ukraine, while others said it would be devastating for morale on the front lines, just as Ukraine is pressing a high-stakes counteroffensive.
“Any internal turmoil is a deadly threat to our statehood … and our actions to defend our fatherland from this threat will be brutal,” Putin said in his speech. Those remarks seemed to close off any possibility of negotiation with Prigozhin, who for the first time issued a statement directly criticizing the president to whom he had previously shown unwavering loyalty.
Insisting that he was “saving Russia,” Prigozhin claimed control of an important strategic command center and airfield in Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia that is a crucial logistical and administrative hub for the war in Ukraine.
Even as Putin spoke, the column of Wagner fighters was making a dash up the M4 highway toward Moscow, with fighting reported in Voronezh, a region just north of Rostov on the road to Moscow. Lipetsk’s governor, Igor Artomonov, later confirmed that the Wagner convoy had crossed into his region, roughly 300 miles from the Kremlin’s walls.
Wagner’s lightning advance appeared to stun military officials. It appeared to be an audacious attempt to topple Russia’s military leadership but not, Prigozhin insisted, Putin himself. Amid reports of explosions in Rostov and conflict in Voronezh, Russian security forces feverishly prepared defenses on the southwestern outskirts of Moscow, while authorities dug up roads near Lipetsk to try to block the Wagner column, according to regional officials.
The astonishing spectacle of Russians confronting Russians while Moscow faced the critical moment of Ukraine’s military counteroffensive left members of the hard-line nationalist pro-war lobby — many of whom support Prigozhin — staggering and confused in comments on social media.
Without naming Prigozhin, Putin said the rebels were “traitors” and called on Wagner fighters to make “the only correct choice” and lay down arms.
“Those who prepared the military mutiny, who raise weapons against combat brothers, have betrayed Russia, and will pay for this. And those who are being pulled into the crime, I’m asking to not make this crucial, tragic, unrepeatable mistake. Make the one right choice — stop participating in criminal actions,” Putin said.
The confrontation had been brewing for months, but many analysts were taken aback by Putin’s failure to intervene earlier to prevent it from boiling over. Prigozhin had made clear his sense of humiliation and outrage over apparent efforts by Shoigu to curb, and potentially sideline Wagner, even after the mercenary group took massive casualties in its long, bloody fight to capture Bakhmut.
Wagner, known for its capability as an offensive unit, left the defense of Bakhmut to regular forces after it secured the city — but in the weeks that followed the mercenary group had not been given any important new role, nor did it win particularly high praise from the Kremlin or other officials.
A row with Shoigu over his subsequent insistence that Wagner sign a contract with the defense ministry, putting the group under his control, deepened the struggle, especially after Putin appeared to side with Shoigu on the matter.
“They wanted to disband Wagner,” Prigozhin said in an audio message confirming plans his agreement to turn the convoy back. “We set out on June 23 on a ‘March of Justice.’ In a day we marched just short of 200 km away from Moscow. During this time, we have not shed a single drop of the blood of our fighters.”
But he acknowledged if Wagner continued, it would lose men.
“Now is the moment when blood can be shed,” he said, “ealizing all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed, we are turning our columns around and leaving in the opposite direction of our field camps, according to the plan,” he said, referring to the agreement brokered by Lukashenko.
The crisis, squarely of Putin’s own making, highlighted the vulnerabilities in his remote, often tone-deaf leadership, his isolation from the sobering reality of Russian military losses, and his failure to put a stop to the bitter months-long struggle between Prigozhin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Prigozhin, who became a billionaire and earned the nickname “Putin’s chef” through government catering contracts, had won praise for his blunt, and often profane, acknowledgment of Russia’s battlefield setbacks in Ukraine. And his rebellion seemed to confirm that Putin is surrounded by incompetent loyalists who are unwilling to tell the Russian leader difficult truths.
Prigozhin, a Putin protégé who once proved useful to his boss, may be seen as an unwelcome, brutish outsider by Russia’s elite, but he is nonetheless popular in Russian nationalist circles and among rank-and-file soldiers for standing up against what he has denounced as the lies told by Russian generals about military casualties and battlefield losses.
Many analysts predicted that Prigozhin would be killed or arrested, potentially further undermining Russian military morale. The Wagner leader is often seen as the most credible of Russia’s field commanders, and his fighters led the effort to seize the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Russia’s only significant territorial gain in the war so far this year.
Putin delivered his emergency speech after a tense night in which events unfolded rapidly. Prigozhin declared an open conflict with Russia’s military leadership and called on Russians to join 25,000 Wagner troops against Shoigu, the defense minister, and other top commanders.
“We won’t be humiliated. We have targets. We’re all ready to die, all 25,000 of us, and 25,000 more after that,” Prigozhin said in an audio message posted on Telegram on Saturday morning. In a later post, he said Putin was “deeply mistaken” in asserting that members of the group were traitors, describing himself and Wagner fighters as patriots who “do not want the country to continue to live in corruption, deceit and bureaucracy.”
Prigozhin claimed on Friday evening that the Russian military had carried out a strike on a Wagner camp and said he would lead a “march of justice” against his enemies among the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry, while denying allegations from at least one top general that he was attempting a coup.
By Saturday morning, Prigozhin and his fighters entered Rostov-on-Don, crossing a heavily fortified region of southern Russia with apparent ease — despite an arrest warrant against Prigozhin from Russia’s main security agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which late Friday accused Prigozhin of “incitement to armed rebellion” and said it had opened a criminal case.
Prigozhin said he had taken control of the main Russian military command base in Rostov and told two Russian military commanders that he would blockade Rostov and send his forces to Moscow unless he could confront his enemies: Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Prigozhin told two senior military commanders that his forces had shot down three Russian military helicopters that fired on the Wagner column, and he threatened further strikes. “We’ll bring them all down if you keep sending them,” he said, according to video of the exchange with officials who appeared to be Col. Gen. Yunus-bek Yevkurov, a deputy defense minister, and Lt. Gen. Vladimir Aleksxeyev, deputy chief of Russia’s military intelligence.
Prigozhin claimed to control all major military objects in Rostov-on-Don — including the main military airfield — but insisted that the headquarters and airfield were continuing operations against Ukraine “as usual.”
“We took control to ensure there were no air force strikes against us but against Ukraine,” he said.
Adding to the fast moving developments on Saturday, Ukrainia officials said they had recaptured territory near Krasnohorivka in the eastern Donetsk region that Russians had occupied since 2014, according to a Telegram post by the commander of the Tavria operational-strategic forces Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi.
The standoff between Prigozhin and the leadership of Russia’s armed forces has been escalating for months. Prigozhin, a Putin ally since the 1990s, when the two men were based in St. Petersburg, had become increasingly vocal in criticizing the military’s top brass for what he described as corruption, greed, military incompetence and lies about military failures and losses.
Prigozhin earlier accused Russian troops of firing on his men, and earlier this month even took a Russian officer prisoner. At one point, he called for Shoigu and Gerasimov to face a firing squad.
Analysts had believed that Prigozhin’s open criticism was permitted by Putin as a way of venting dissatisfaction over the course of the war, so long as the Wagner leader did not openly criticize the Russian president and remained firmly in the “patriotic camp.”
But by Friday morning, Prigozhin had issued his biggest challenge yet, as he contradicted Putin’s main pretexts for invading Ukraine, declaring that Russia had faced no extraordinary security threat from Ukraine and that Russian military officials had deceived Putin into going to war.
The war, Prigozhin claimed, was designed by Russian officials and oligarchs who had plundered two separatist regions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, for years, but grew greedy and wanted to plunder all of Ukraine.
A U.S. intelligence official described the current situation as “volatile” and said that tensions between Prigozhin and the Russian Defense Ministry worsened in recent weeks.
Wagner has provided essential support to regular Russian forces, but Prigozhin has made no secret of his frustration with what he regards as insufficient support and resources from Moscow for his mercenary fighters. Prigozhin also maintained a secretive back channel with Russia’s enemy, Ukraine, via that country’s military intelligence service, The Washington Post has reported, based on classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the Discord messaging platform.
A senior Ukrainian official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a quickly developing situation, said Prigozhin was probably aiming to topple Shoigu.
The Ukrainian official said that Prigozhin’s Wagner forces lacked the strength and numbers to prevail in a direct fight with the Russian military. “Prigozhin is not bluffing, but he does not want to fight with the army,” the Ukrainian official said.
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