In an address to the nation on Monday evening, Russian President Vladimir Putin talked about the short-lived mutiny by Wagner mercenary group on Saturday.
Putin said that most members of the mutinous private military company are patriots.
He offered a choice to the Wagner soldiers involved in Saturday's failed armed rebellion. They can either sign a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry or other security agencies, return home or move to neighboring Belarus, the Russian leader said in his televised addressed, according to RT.
"The overwhelming majority of the fighters and commanders of the Wagner group are also Russian patriots, devoted to their people and country. They proved this with their courage on the battlefield,” Putin said in his address on Monday evening.
The organizers of the insurrection “kept them in the dark and tried using them against their brothers in arms, with whom they fought shoulder to shoulder for the sake of the country and its future,” he said.
The Russian leader said in his statement that the ‘organisers of this rebellion will be brought to justice’ and that the rebellion was ‘criminal activity which is aimed at weakening the country."
He said that "any kind of blackmail is doomed to failure" and that the mutiny leaders ‘wanted our society to be fragmented."
He thanked the Russian public for its ‘support, patriotism and solidarity’ since the rebellion and Belarus’s Lukashenko for a peaceful resolution.
‘Virtually the entirety of Russian society… was united by its responsibility to defend their homeland,’ Putin said.
He also thanked Wagner officials who ‘took the right decision to stop and go back to prevent bloodshed’.
The uprising was ‘doomed to fail’ and that ‘its organisers, even though they lost their sense of right and wrong, couldn’t have failed to realise that,’ he continued.
Putin also accused Ukraine of being involved and calls the revolt ‘revenge for their failed counteroffensive’.
MNA/PR