By Guy Faulconbridge and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW, June 28 (Reuters) – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said he persuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin not to “wipe out” mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, in response to what the Kremlin cast as a mutiny that pushed Russia towards civil war.
Putin initially vowed to crush the mutiny, comparing it to the wartime turmoil that ushered in the revolution of 1917 and then a civil war, but hours later a deal was clinched to allow Prigozhin and some of his fighters to go to Belarus.
Prigozhin flew to Belarus from Russia on Tuesday.
While describing his Saturday conversation with Putin, Lukashenko used the Russian criminal slang phrase for killing someone, equivalent to the English phrase to “wipe out”.
“I also understood: a brutal decision had been made (and it was the undertone of Putin’s address) to wipe out” the mutineers, Lukashenko told a meeting of his army officials and journalists on Tuesday, according to Belarusian state media.
“I suggested to Putin not to rush. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘Let’s talk with Prigozhin, with his commanders.’ To which he told me: ‘Listen, Sasha, it’s useless. He doesn’t even pick up the phone, he doesn’t want to talk to anyone’.”
Putin used the same Russian verb in 1999 about Chechen militants, vowing to “wipe out them out in the shithouse”, remarks that became a widely quoted emblem of his severe persona.
There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin on Lukashenko’s remarks, which give a rare insight into the conversations inside the Kremlin as Russia, according to Putin’s own account, teetered towards turmoil not seen for decades.
Lukashenko, both an old acquaintance of Prigozhin and close ally of Putin, said that he had advised the Russian president to think “beyond our own noses” and that Prigozhin’s elimination could lead to a widespread revolt by his fighters.
The Belarusian leader also said that his own army could benefit from the experience of Wagner troops who, according to a deal struck with the Kremlin, are now free to move to Belarus.
“This is the most trained unit in the army,” BelTA state agency quoted Lukashenko as saying. “Who will argue with this? My military also understand this, and we don’t have such people in Belarus.”
Later Lukashenko told his military that “people fail to understand that we are approaching this in a pragmatic way … They’ve (Wagner) been through it, they’ll tell us about the weaponry – what worked well, which worked badly.”
Prigozhin halted what he called was “march of justice” on Moscow from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don within 200 kilometres of the capital after Lukashenko’s intervention.
In Moscow, Putin sought to reassert his authority after the mutiny led by Prigozhin in protest against the Russian military’s handling of the conflict in Ukraine.
Russian authorities also dropped a criminal case against his Wagner Group mercenary force, state news agency RIA reported, apparently fulfilling another condition of the deal brokered by Lukashenko late on Saturday that defused the crisis.
Prigozhin, a former Putin ally and ex-convict whose mercenaries have fought the bloodiest battles of the Ukraine war and taken heavy casualties, had earlier said he would go to neighbouring Belarus at the invitation of Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin and an acquaintance of the Wagner chief.
Ukraine hopes the chaos caused by the mutiny attempt will undermine Russian defences as Ukraine presses a counteroffensive to recapture occupied territory in the south and east.
‘YOU HAVE STOPPED CIVIL WAR’
Early on Tuesday, flight tracking service Flightradar24’s website showed an Embraer Legacy 600 jet, bearing identification codes that match a plane linked to Prigozhin in U.S. sanctions documents, descending near the Belarus capital Minsk.
It first appeared on the tracking site above Rostov, the southern Russian city that Prigozhin’s fighters captured during the mutiny.
Prigozhin was seen on Saturday night smiling and high-fiving bystanders as he rode out of Rostov in the back of an SUV after ordering his men to stand down. He has not yet been seen in public in Belarus.
Putin meanwhile told some 2,500 Russian security personnel at a ceremony on a square in the Kremlin complex in Moscow that the people and the armed forces stood together in opposition to the rebel mercenaries.
“You have saved our motherland from upheaval. In fact, you have stopped a civil war,” he said.
Putin was joined by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose dismissal had been one of the mutineers’ main demands.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a news briefing on Tuesday the deal ending the mutiny was being implemented.
Russian leaders have tried to convey that the situation is returning to normal. Peskov dismissed the idea that Putin’s grip on power had been shaken by the mutiny, calling such thoughts “hysteria”.
DEMONSTRATION OF PROTEST
Prigozhin, 62, said he launched the mutiny to save his group after being ordered to place it under command of the defence ministry, which he has cast as ineffectual in the war in Ukraine.
His fighters halted their campaign on Saturday to avert bloodshed after nearly reaching Moscow, he said. “We went as a demonstration of protest, not to overthrow the government of the country,” Prigozhin said in an audio message on Monday.
Lukashenko said on Tuesday that his country offered Wagner fighters an abandoned military base. “Please – we have a fence, we have everything – put up your tents,” Lukashenko said, according to BELTA.
The prospect of Wagner establishing a base in Belarus was greeted with alarm by some of its neighbours. Latvia and Lithuania called for NATO to strengthen its eastern borders in response, and Polish President Andrzej Duda described the move a “negative signal”.
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda said deployment of Wagner fighters in Belarus would destabilise neighbouring countries.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters after a meeting with leaders of seven NATO countries in the Hague that the alliance “sent a clear message to Moscow and Minsk that NATO is there to protect every ally, every inch of NATO territory.”
Washington, which has given Ukraine more than $10 billion in military assistance, announced $500 million in new aid including vehicles and munitions, according to a Pentagon statement.
