MOSCOW: Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said on Monday that the country had faced “a challenge to its stability” and must remain united behind President Vladimir Putin following Saturday’s abortive mutiny by heavily armed mercenary fighters.
Under a deal late on Saturday that defused the crisis and averted possible bloodshed, the Kremlin said the Wagner Group mercenaries would return to base, while their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin would move to Belarus. All criminal charges against him and his fighters would be dropped, the Kremlin said.
In what appeared to be the first public comments by a senior Russian official since then, Mishustin appealed at a tele-vised government meeting for national unity in the face of what he said were efforts by the West to undermine Rus-sia.
“The main thing in these conditions is to ensure the sovereignty and independence of our country, the security and well-being of citizens,” said Mishustin, a technocrat who was appointed prime minister in 2020.
“For this, the consolidation of the whole of society is especially important; we need to act together, as one team, and maintain the unity of all forces, rallying around the president,” he said.
Mishustin, a former head of Russia’s federal tax service, also took a swipe at the West. “As the president noted, virtu-ally the entire military, economic, information machine of the West is directed against us,” he said.
Putin said on Saturday that the rebellion by the Wagner mercenary force had threatened Russia’s very existence un-der threat and vowed to crush it.
However, he has not publicly commented since then on the dramatic events or on the deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that defused the crisis.
Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers say an aborted mutiny in Russia at the weekend shows Moscow’s war in Ukraine is causing domestic instability and undermining its military power, but stress their focus remains on support-ing Kyiv.
Wagner mercenary forces under renegade leader Yevgeny Prigozhin seized control of military headquarters in south-ern Russia, then began to move towards Moscow on Saturday before suddenly heading back to eastern Ukraine after a deal with the Kremlin. –Agencies
