(The Wall Street Journal) Russia moved to shore up its internal security forces as the Ministry of Defense said that the Wagner paramilitary group that launched a mutiny last week was preparing to hand over its heavy weapons, an indication that it could be disbanded as an autonomous force in coming days.
In the first significant change in Russia’s security system in the aftermath of the aborted rebellion, the Russian National Guard – a force primarily responsible for maintaining order inside Russia – will obtain tanks and long-range artillery, according to its commander, Viktor Zolotov.
The National Guard was outgunned by Wagner on Saturday, and did not put up notable resistance as Wagner’s mutineers seized the southern city of Rostov and advanced swiftly toward Moscow.
Celebrating the mutiny’s defeat, President Vladimir Putin Tuesday gathered the country’s security leadership on the main square inside the Kremlin for a ceremony to congratulate them on “sheltering our Motherland from shocks, and in fact stopping civil war.”
While Putin offered amnesty to Wagner’s troops and leaders for the attempted mutiny, on Tuesday he hinted that the company’s owner Yevgeny Prigozhin and other leaders could be prosecuted for corruption.
The Russian government provided Wagner with 86 billion rubles, equivalent to $1 billion, to pay salaries and insurance to its men between May 2022 and May 2023, while Prigozhin’s catering business, Concord, earned another 80 billion rubles in contracts to provide food and other services to the Russian armed forces, he said.
“The upkeep of the Wagner group was entirely funded by the state,” Putin said, adding: “I hope that nobody stole anything, or didn’t steal that much – we will look into all this.”
Making a distinction between Prigozhin and regular fighters, Putin has repeatedly praised the courage of the group’s rank and file. Wagner members who wanted to sign contracts with the regular Russian military were welcome to join, Putin said Monday, while others could go home or follow Prigozhin to exile in Belarus.
There was no immediate confirmation that Wagner, which counted 25,000 troops by Prigozhin’s assessment, was indeed preparing to disarm. Its arsenal includes tanks, aircraft, howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems and air-defense batteries that were used to shoot down six Russian helicopters and one airborne command center plane on Saturday.
Under a deal brokered by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin Saturday night agreed to halt what he had described as a “march of justice” and accepted, at least for now, to go to Belarus.
On Tuesday morning, the Russian Federal Security Service said it closed the criminal case against Wagner’s mutineers. An Embraer Legacy 600 jet affiliated with Wagner was spotted by flight-monitoring services leaving the southern Russian city of Rostov – which had been seized by Prigozhin on Saturday – and landing in the Belarusian airport of Machulishchy near Minsk on Tuesday. There was no confirmation that Prigozhin was on board.
Speaking in Minsk, Lukashenko said Tuesday that he had offered his mediation because Belarus wouldn’t have survived strife in Russia, its main ally. “My position is: if Russia collapses, we will all be under its wreckage, and we will all die,” he said.
There were no winners in Saturday’s crisis, he added. “Don’t make a hero out of me, out of Putin, or out of Prigozhin, because we have let the situation spin out of control, we thought that it would dissipate on its own, and it didn’t,” Lukashenko said. “There are no heroes in this matter.”
Prigozhin was Putin’s onetime confidant, and the president poured huge resources into Wagner in part to create a pretorian force with personal loyalty that could be balanced against the regular military and other security services. Up until the last moment, Putin did not interfere in the increasingly acrimonious conflict between Prigozhin and the leadership of Russia’s armed forces.
The mutiny showed vulnerability in Putin’s regime, and removed Wagner as a useful hedge, while exposing him to the wrath of many regular officers for allowing the crisis to occur in the first place. While Putin Tuesday praised the heroism of the Russian pilots who were shot down on Saturday as they attempted to stop Wagner’s columns, many in the Russian military were outraged by the fact that he has amnestied their comrades’ killers.
“The main gratitude and the direct responsibility of the state toward pilots who fulfilled their duty and sacrificed their lives to save the Motherland would be the inevitable and severe punishment of their murderers. In accordance with the laws of the Russian Federation,” commented Fighterbomber, a Telegram channel with nearly 400,000 followers that usually reflects the thinking of Russian Air Force officers.
The discontent within the army – already high because of large losses in the badly planned Ukrainian war – drives the urgency to bolster its counterweight, the Russian National Guard, with more powerful weapons. The National Guard has remained relatively unscathed by the fighting so far. “It’s divide and rule, in case someone else becomes a traitor,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
Semiautonomous Chechen forces loyal to strongman Ramzan Kadyrov are also part of the National Guard. It was not clear whether they, too, would obtain tanks and long-range artillery.
In a defiant recording released on Monday, Prigozhin was unrepentant, saying that his hand had been forced by a decision of the Russian Ministry of Defense to bring all private military companies, including Wagner, under full control of the regular armed forces by July 1. Between 1% and 2% of Wagner’s men had agreed to sign the contract, aware of the incompetence of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Prigozhin said.
Integrating Wagner into the regular Russian military would “lead to the complete loss of combat capacity,” Prigozhin said. “Experienced fighters and commanders will be spread around and turned into cannon fodder, unable to use their combat potential and their combat experience.”
Still, he said, Wagner was planning to drive to Russia’s Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov and publicly hand over its heavy weapons on June 30 – a plan that, he said, had been scuttled by the Russian military’s attack on Wagner camps Friday. Some 30 Wagner fighters were killed in those missile and helicopter strikes, he said.
Many Russians were disappointed that the advance on Moscow stopped, he added, “because, apart from the struggle for our existence, they saw in the march of justice the support in the fight against bureaucracy and other ailments that afflict our country.”
Wagner was the only Russian formation that was able to advance in Ukraine since last summer, seizing the town of Bakhmut after months of heavy combat that killed tens of thousands of troops.
Lukashenko said Tuesday that Belarus was taking a “pragmatic approach” to Wagner, and would take advantage of the group’s experience to build up its own armed forces.
“If their commanders come to us and help us…They will tell us about weapons: which worked and which didn’t. Tactics, weapons, how to advance, how to defend. This is priceless, and this is what we need to take from the Wagnerites,” he told Belarus Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin, according to the Belta state news agency.
“No reason to be afraid of them,” Lukashenko added. “We, too, are keeping an eye out.”
