16.15 BST
'Society demanded it,' says Prigozhin in first
comments since abandoning mutiny
Andrew Roth
The Russian
warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has reappeared for the first time since abandoning
his armed mutiny on Saturday evening, issuing a defiant 11-minute statement in
which he defended the Wagner uprising and said that “society demanded it”.
In the
statement, Prigozhin denied that Wagner sought to topple Putin and said that
the uprising had shown that there were “serious problems with security on the
whole territory of our country”.
“It was not
our goal to overthrow the regime,” Prigozhin said in the voice memo, which was
uploaded to his Concord Group’s Telegram page.
“We stopped
at that moment, when it became clear that much blood would be spilled,” he
continued, describing the progress of a military convoy that reached striking
distance of Moscow. “That’s why we believe that the demonstration of what we
were planning to do was enough. Our decision to turn back had two factors: we
didn’t want to spill Russian blood. Secondly, we marched as a demonstration of
our protest.”
He once
again accused the Russian defence ministry of targeting his troops with
artillery fire, calling it the “trigger for us to move out immediately”.
“The goal
of the march was to not allow the destruction of the Wagner private military
company and hold to account the officials who through their unprofessional
actions have committed a massive number of errors. Society demanded it.”
Prigozhin
acknowledged that his troops had killed Russian airmen during their uprising,
saying they “regretted that they were required to carry out strikes against
aircraft but they were hitting our forces with bombs and rocket strikes”.
He also
claimed that the troops movement into Russia was a “masterclass” in how Russia
should have carried out its 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which failed
to achieve its goal of taking Kyiv.
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