Putin had vowed earlier to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protege, whose forces seized a key military facility in southern Russia before advancing on the capital.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, has agreed to leave Russia for Belarus, the Kremlin said Saturday, in a deal apparently brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that ends an armed insurrection, which marked the gravest threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin's authority in decades.
The announcement defuses a crisis that began when Wagner troops took control of a key military facility in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and some fighters advanced towards the capital. The president described events as an insurrection, which he vowed to defeat, and Moscow began to scale up its security measures.
On Friday, Prigozhin accused Russian forces of striking a Wagner military camp and killing "a huge amount" of his fighters - a claim Russia's Ministry of Defense has denied and called an "informational provocation." "There are 25,000 of us and we are going to find out why there is such chaos in the country. There are 25,000 of us waiting as a tactical reserve and a strategic reserve. It's the whole army and the whole country, everyone who wants to, join us. We must end this debacle," he said on Telegram.
During his speech Saturday, Putin said Wagner's "betrayal" and "any actions that fracture our unity," are "a stab in the back of our country and our people.""We are patriots of our Motherland, we fought and are fighting," he said in audio messages.The Wagner chief claimed his forces seized the Russian Southern Military Headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don "without firing a single shot," suggesting that "the country supports us.
When asked what position Prigozhin would take in Belarus, Peskov said he "cannot answer the question." Peskov said Lukashenko was able to draw on a personal relationship with Prigozhin to broker the deal. Russian officials said detachments of Chechen special forces had been seen in Rostov to suppress the rebellion. However, CNN was unable to independently confirm that Chechen units have arrived in Rostov.
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