Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighbouring Belarus, which has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troops who joined him in the uprising will not face prosecution and those who did not will be offered contracts by the Defence Ministry, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
After the deal was reached, Prigozhin said he was ordering his troops to halt their march on Moscow and retreat to field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian troops.
The deal appeared to defuse a dramatically escalating crisis that represented the most significant challenge to President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power.
The deal was mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally, according to Peskov.
After the agreement, Prigozhin announced that his men were only 200 kilometres from Moscow but that he had decided to ask them to return to Ukraine to avoid “spilling Russian blood”.
On Saturday morning, Prigozhin’s private army appeared to control military installations in Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of Russian operations in Ukraine.
But the target was Moscow’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom he had harshly criticised for his conduct of the war in Ukraine. The Russian capital had prepared itself for the arrival of the Wagner forces.
