MOSCOW - Belarus welcomed the head of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin into exile on Tuesday following an aborted rebellion, as Nato warned it was ready to defend against “Moscow or Minsk”. 

A plane linked to Prigozhin was shown on a flight tracking service taking off from the southern Russian city of Rostov early on Tuesday and landing in Belarus.

“I see Prigozhin is already flying in on this plane,” state news agency Belta quoted Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko as saying. “Yes, indeed, he is in Belarus today.”

As the fallout unfolded from Prigozhin’s brief mutiny – widely seen as the biggest threat to Kremlin authority in decades – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin sought to shore up his authority by thanking regular troops for averting a civil war.

But as Russia announced preparations to disarm Wagner fighters, Mr Putin’s arch foe, jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, launched a stinging attack on the President in his first comments since the aborted mutiny by the paramilitaries.

“There is no bigger threat to Russia than Putin’s regime,” Mr Navalny said on social media.

“Putin’s regime is so dangerous to the country that even its inevitable demise will create the threat of civil war,” he wrote.

In The Hague, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said it was still too early to draw final conclusions from the move to Belarus of Prigozhin and, likely, some of his forces, but he vowed that the alliance was ready to defend its members.

“What is absolutely clear is that we have sent a clear message to Moscow and to Minsk that Nato is there to protect every ally and every inch of Nato territory,” Mr Stoltenberg said.

‘Stopped civil war’

Mr Putin’s supporters, however, insisted that his rule was not weakened by the revolt.

Asked whether Mr Putin’s power was diminished by the sight of Wagner’s rebel mercenaries seizing a military headquarters, advancing on Moscow and shooting down military aircraft along the way, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused political commentators of exaggerating, adding that: “We don’t agree.”

Mr Putin himself attempted to portray the dramatic events at the weekend as a victory for the Russian army.

“You de facto stopped civil war,” Mr Putin told troops from the Defence Ministry, National Guard, FSB security service and Interior Ministry gathered in a Kremlin courtyard to hold a minute’s silence for airmen slain by Wagner.

“In the confrontation with rebels, our comrades-in-arms, pilots, were killed. They did not flinch and honourably fulfilled their orders and their military duty,” Mr Putin said.

Private army

Prigozhin, a former Kremlin ally and catering contractor who built Russia’s most powerful private army, has boasted – with some support from news footage – that his men were cheered by civilians during his short-lived revolt.

But Mr Putin insisted that Wagner’s ordinary fighters had seen that “the army and the people were not with them”.

In a separate meeting with defence officials, Mr Putin confirmed that Wagner was wholly funded by the Russian federal budget, despite operating as an independent company, adding that in the past year alone since the assault on Ukraine, Moscow had paid the group 86.262 billion roubles (S$1.4 billion) in salaries.

Russian officials have been trying to put the crisis behind them for three days, with the FSB dropping charges against rank-and-file Wagner troopers and the military preparing to disarm the group.

“Preparations are under way for the transfer of heavy military equipment from the private military company Wagner to units of the Russian armed forces,” the Defence Ministry said.

But, questions remain over how the Kremlin allowed the violence of its operation in Ukraine to spill back into Russia.

Belarus strongman Lukashenko is seeking credit for stepping in to mediate Wagner’s U-turn on the road to Moscow and by Tuesday he had criticised Russia’s handling of the issue.

The feud between Wagner and the army had escalated for months, with Prigozhin making increasingly scathing statements against the generals’ handling of the offensive in Ukraine, blaming them for thousands of Russian losses.

Mr Lukashenko said: “We missed the situation, and then we thought that it would resolve itself, but it did not resolve.“

“Two people who fought at the front clashed, there are no heroes in this case,” he added, in an apparent reference to the Wagner chief and his rival, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

‘We could waste him’

Talking to his own military officials, Mr Lukashenko said that Prigozhin was arriving in Belarus on Tuesday, and revealed that he had urged Mr Putin not to kill the rogue mercenary.

“I said to Putin: we could waste him, no problem. If not on the first try, then on the second. I told him: don’t do this,” Mr Lukashenko said, according to state media.

In his address, Mr Putin also stressed that the revolt had not forced Russia to withdraw any of its units from Ukraine, where fighting continued as Kyiv’s brigades pursued their counter-offensive in their nation’s east and south.

“All military formations continued to wage a heroic fight at the front,” Mr Putin noted.

The bloody conflict is now 16 months old, with mass casualties on both sides and a rising civilian toll.

On Tuesday, a Russian rocket struck a bustling restaurant in the middle of Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, killing at least three people including a teenager, the interior minister said.

The blast at the Ria Pizza restaurant also wounded at least 42 at the restaurant, popular with both soldiers and journalists in the town of 150,000 people, one of the largest still under Ukraine control in the east.

Also on Tuesday, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it had evidence that Russian troops had summarily executed at least 77 detained civilians.

“It is a war crime... it’s also a gross violation of international human rights law,” said Ms Matilda Bogner, head of the mission.

Meanwhile, the United States announced a new US$500 million (S$675 million) tranche of arms to bolster Ukraine’s mounting counter-offensive, including armoured vehicles, precision munitions and mine-clearing equipment. AFP