"Now the moment has come when blood could be shed, therefore, realising all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed on one of the sides, we turn our columns around and return in the opposite direction to the field camps, according to the plan." "During this time, we have not shed a single drop of the blood of our fighters. "In a day we travelled, not reaching 200 km, to Moscow. "We left on June 23 for the march of justice," Prigozhin adds in his audio messaged. Reports suggested the fighters had been continuing up the M4 highway, with officials in Lipetsk - the next city north of Voronezh en route to Moscow - urging citizens to stay indoors. The move comes after a convoy of his fighters entered the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in the early hours of this morning, where UK defence intelligence says the city's military headquarters was very likely captured.įrom there, the group moved to Voronzeh and reportedly took control of all the military facilities in the city. He says he "gave the order to turn back because of the risk of blood being spilled". Now, Yevgeny Prigozhin has issued an audio message confirming his fighters are returning to their bases to "avoid bloodshed". "But while we are not having a crescendo moment now, this is not the end of the crisis."Īs we told you in our previous post, Belarus announced that the head of the Wagner group had agreed to de-escalate the situation in Russia. "Yet now at this moment of confrontation it seems that, for whatever reason, Prigozhin has been convinced to turn back. everybody says they believe this to have been the gravest threat to Vladimir Putin's rule. You've had the Western countries including the UK watching closely. "This whole situation has been extraordinary. "He said this was not a military coup but at the same time we saw heightened security in Moscow. "All of that then upended in this extraordinary row where you had Prigozhin accusing the Russian military of trying to kill his forces, accusing them of corruption, accusing them of hiding thousands of Russian dead, and saying he wouldn't stop until he had spoken to them. "There are criminal charges against this man, a man who has been very close to the president and was a key player in Russia's war effort. "And then these images of this convoy heading towards the capital and President Putin being forced to come out and issue that extraordinary statement earlier today where, he accused Prigozhin of armed mutiny. "You had these Wagner troops moving into a city on the border with Ukraine, taking control of that, according to the volcanic chief. "This man has defied his president, who has been his kind of key mentor, and also defied the Russian leaders, accusing them of killing his men, really interrupting the Russian war effort in Ukraine and instead turning his attention to Russian forces. "The fact that you now have Yevgeny Prigozhin announcing that he is about turning and heading away from Moscow after a whole day of expectation of this convoy moving on the capital is again another extraordinary twist.
"It's another extraordinary in this incredibly bizarre and unsettling for President Putin's story", says our security and defence editor Deborah Haynes.
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