Vladimir Putin met with Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin just days after his mutiny, the Kremlin has claimed.
The Russian president is said to have held three-hour talks with the mercenary leader at the Kremlin on 29 June – five days after his troops marched on Moscow.
“The only thing we can say is that the president gave his assessment of the company’s [Wagner’s] actions at the front during the Special Military Operation and also gave his assessment of the events of 24 June,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Ukraine war latest: Deadly strike on civilians giving out aid at school
The dramatic but short-lived rebellion sparked an emergency address from Mr Putin, who, without mentioning his former confident Prigozhin by name, labelled those behind the mutiny as “traitors”.
Prigozhin’s mercenaries pulled back after Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko helped broker a “deal”, which would supposedly see the businessman move to the Russian-allied country and his forces absorbed into the military.
However, Mr Lukashenko said last week the Wagner leader was back in Russia and his fighters had not taken up an offer to relocate across the border.
It comes after a top Russian military leader made his first public appearance since Prigozhin attempted to topple him in his mutiny.
General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, disappeared after the armed uprising last month.
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Top general appears since failed mutiny
It raised questions over whether General Gerasimov, the third most powerful man in the Russian military and believed to be a holder of one of the country’s “nuclear briefcases”, would retain his position.
But defence ministry footage released yesterday showed him using the title in a military command room and giving orders to top generals.
It also comes after a report by two independent Russian news outlets, working alongside researchers in Germany, claimed almost 50,000 Russian men had died so far in Ukraine.
The figure, the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead, is significantly higher than that of the Kremlin, which has publicly acknowledged the deaths of around 6,000 soldiers.
On another day of conflict in Ukraine:
- The governor of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region accused Russia of using a guided aviation bomb to strike a school building being used as a distribution point for humanitarian aid;
- Three women and a man, all in their 40s, were killed in the strike, while around a dozen people were injured;
- US President Joe Biden arrived in the UK for talks with Rishi Sunak, with Ukraine and the upcoming NATO summit believed to be high on the agenda;
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted his forces have “taken the initiative” after reports of a slowdown in the counteroffensive.
Photos reportedly taken from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal album and leaked by Russia’s security service (FSB) that purport to show the Wagner Group leader in disguise while abroad
General Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces since 2012, was appointed to lead the Russian campaign in Ukraine in January.
However, he has been the subject of fierce criticism by Prigozhin and some nationalist war bloggers for overseeing what they view as an expensive, slow and poorly equipped armed forces that failed to defeat a smaller neighbouring country.
Prigozhin – whose Wagner forces have been a key asset to Russia’s successes on the frontline in Ukraine, including in the battle for Bakhmut – has repeatedly accused General Gerasimov and Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu of botching the war.
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And when his mercenary troops marched on Moscow last month, Prigozhin described it not as a military coup but as a “march for justice”, aiming to “bring to justice those who… made a huge number of mistakes during the special military operation”.
He did not name Mr Shoigu or General Gerasimov by name in his speech.
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Wagner boss ‘back in Russia’
It comes as two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tubingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.
The researchers used official excess mortality figures, along with inheritance records and official mortality data, to calculate that around 50,000 Russian men had died in the conflict so far.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties, while Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of more than 6,000 soldiers.
A leaked assessment from the US defence intelligence agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000 to 43,000, while in May the White House said around 20,000 Russian soldiers had died since December.
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In February, the UK Ministry of Defence said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war.
On Monday, the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Yuriy Malashko, said three women and a man had been killed after a guided aviation bomb was used to strike a school building being used as a distribution point for humanitarian aid.
A total of 13 people were also injured. The general prosecutor’s office said it has opened a criminal case into war crimes.
Pictures showed rubble and debris scattered across a courtyard and street, where a piece of material bearing a logo resembling the UN Refugee Agency lies.