On June 26, 2023, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenaries escaped from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and the region of Voronezh after a deal was mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end their short-lived armed mutiny.
Under the agreement, the Wagner soldiers who took part in the rebellion will not be prosecuted and Prigozhin will go into exile in Belarus. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone on Sunday morning, according to Belarus’s Belta news agency.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his defence minister held a series of calls with key allies, including the United States, to discuss Putin’s “weakness” and Ukraine’s next counteroffensive steps. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the short-lived revolt exposed “real cracks” in Putin’s authority.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the revolt revealed “divisions” within the Russian leadership and exposed the “fragility of its military and auxiliary forces”. In China’s first official remarks on the rebellion, the foreign ministry said Beijing supported Russia in “protecting national stability”, adding that the issue was Russia’s “internal affair”.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, said the Kremlin has been left in a “deeply unstable” situation and that Lukashenko’s direct role in halting Wagner’s advance was “humiliating to Putin”.
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