Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has broken his silence after abandoning his armed uprising on Saturday evening, insisting that he marched on Moscow to stop the Kremlin taking control of his mercenary army and denying a plot to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

Speaking in an 11-minute audio clip posted on Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels, Prigozhin claimed the armed uprising was a ‘master class’ on how Russia’s assault on Kyiv should have looked.

He said he only called off his group’s surge for the Russian capital to avoid spilling Russian blood, adding that the uprising was intended to register a protest at the ineffectual conduct of the war in Ukraine.

Prigozhin described his Wagner mercenary fighters as ‘perhaps the most experienced and combat effective unit in Russia, possibly in the world’, and said his private military company had done ‘an enormous amount of work in the interests of Russia’. 

He also claimed he launched the uprising to ‘prevent the destruction of the Wagner group’, noting that they had been ordered to hand over their weapons to the Russian military and had suffered casualties in air strikes at the hands of Russia’s air force.  

‘The purpose of the campaign was to prevent the destruction of the Wagner PMC and to bring to justice those who, through their unprofessional actions, made a huge number of mistakes during the special military operation,’ Prigozhin said.

‘We went to demonstrate our protest, and not to overthrow the government in the country.’ 

Prigozhin, who did not reveal from where he was speaking, bragged that the ease with which it had advanced on Moscow exposes ‘serious security problems’. 

It comes despite reports from news website Meduza that claimed the mercenary leader frantically called Putin en route to Moscow having realised he’d made a mistake, only for the Russian leader to ignore his call and serve a chilling reminder of who remains in charge.

Prigozhin also claimed that despite not showing any aggression towards Russian forces, the Russian air force launched an aerial bombardments on his troops, killing 30 people.

This, he said, ‘was the trigger’ that motivated him to order Wagner mercenaries to seize Russian soil.

He said: ‘We covered 780 kilometres in a day. Not a single soldier on the ground was killed. We regret that we were forced to strike at [Russian] air assets, but they dropped bombs and launched missile strikes.’

Up to 15 Russian air force pilots are believed to have been killed by Wagner forces amid the attacks. 

Prigozhin added: ‘When we walked past Russian cities on June 23-24, civilians greeted us with Russian flags and with the emblems and flags of the Wagner PMC. They were all happy when we passed by. Many of them are still writing words of support, and some are disappointed that we stopped, because in the “march of justice”, in addition to our struggle for existence, they saw support for the fight against bureaucracy and other ills that exist in our country today.

‘We started our march because of injustice. On the way, we didn’t kill a single soldier on the ground. In one day they reached a point just 200 kilometres from Moscow, (and) they took complete control of the city of Rostov.

‘We gave a master class in how it should have been done on February 24, 2022 (when Russia sent troops into Ukraine). We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government.’

Prigozhin concluded his statement by saying that he ordered troops to stop their surge some 200km outside Moscow in the recognition that any further progress would’ve resulted in armed conflict and many deaths. 

‘We stopped at the moment when the first assault detachment, which approached 200 kilometres to Moscow, reconnoitered the area and it was obvious that at that moment a lot of blood would be shed. 

‘Therefore, we felt that the demonstration of what we were going to do, it is sufficient.’

The Wagner leader also confirmed that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was instrumental in helping carve out a deal between the Kremlin and Prigozhin that would see the latter escape punishment for organising the uprising.

Lukashenko is said to have offered Prigozhin refuge in Minsk in turn for his safety and amnesty for any Wagner troops that participated in seizing the southern city of Rosotv-on-Don and marching for Moscow.

However, several Russian media outlets reported that a criminal investigation against Prigozhin remained open, with some legislators calling for serious punishment after Putin on Saturday declared he would ‘punish the traitors who betray Russia’. 

Though Wagner’s armed uprising on Russian soil came as a surprise to most, Prigozhin’s hatred for Russia’s military command has long been established. 

Before the uprising, he had condemned Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian army chief General Valery Gerasimov with expletive-ridden insults for months, attacking them for failing to provide his troops with enough ammunition during the fight for the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, the war’s longest and bloodiest battle.

Putin praised the nation on Monday for unity after the armed rebellion and thanked Wagner mercenary fighters and commanders who had stood down to avoid bloodshed.

He said he would honour his promise to allow Wagner fighters to relocate to Belarus if they wanted, or to sign a contract with the Defence Ministry or simply return to their families. He made no mention of Prigozhin.

Earlier in the day he held calls with the leaders of Iran and Qatar, the Kremlin said, and addressed a forum of youth engineers in a recorded video message that contained no mention of the uprising.

It is not yet clear what the fissures opened by the 24-hour rebellion will mean for the war in Ukraine, where western officials say Russia’s troops suffer low morale. Wagner’s forces were key to Russia’s only land victory in months, in Bakhmut.

Fighting continued in Ukraine, where Kyiv’s forces claimed new victories in their battle to evict Russian troops from the east and south of the country, but in the Russian capital authorities stood down their enhanced security regime.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, was at pains to stress that there had been a return to normal, having announced at the weekend that Prigozhin would be permitted to seek exile in Belarus and that there would be a general amnesty for his troops.

Putin himself did not directly address the dramatic events, but made a video speech to a youth forum dubbed the ‘Engineers of the future’ and praised companies for overcoming ‘severe external challenges’.

Wagner headquarters in Saint Petersburg said it remained open for business, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the firm would continue to operate in Mali and the Central African Republic.

Putin, his office said, had spoken to Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi by phone and had received Tehran’s ‘full support’.

He also received a call from Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who also expressed his backing.

Defence minister Shoigu appeared in more pre-recorded footage on state television, apparently visiting troops in Ukraine, but it was not clear when the piece was filmed.

Officials in Moscow and in the Voronezh region south of the capital lifted ‘anti-terrorist’ emergency security measures imposed to protect the capital from rebel assault.

Ukrainian military leaders, meanwhile, insisted they were making progress in the south and east of the country, and President Volodymyr Zelensky made a morale-boosting trip to troops fighting Russian forces near the city of Bakhmut.

‘We are knocking the enemy out of its positions on the flanks of the city of Bakhmut,’ eastern ground force commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said. ‘Ukraine is regaining its territory. We are moving forward.’

Deputy defence minister Ganna Malyar said Ukraine had recaptured the rural settlement of Rivnopil, on the southern front in the Donetsk region.

Ukrainian residents in the frontline town of Druzhkivka, near Bakhmut, also in Donetsk, told AFP that four explosions rocked a residential district overnight.

The blasts severed water and sewage pipes, shattered windows and threw up stones that hit yards and roofs, but municipal authorities said no one was hurt.

‘It was a ‘fun’ night, we haven’t had this for a long time, it’s been quiet for a month or so,’ said 66-year-old Lyubov, showing off the new hole in her cement-shingled roof.

The wine-growing and salt-mining city of Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas, was captured in May by Russian forces led by Prighozin’s private army.

The victory was short-lived, however.

With the Wagner chief feuding with Shoigu and Gerasimov, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive.

The Western allies backing Ukraine with weaponry and cash see Putin’s grip on power weakened by both Wagner’s revolt and the operation in Ukraine.

NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, visiting Lithuania ahead of the alliance’s Vilnius summit next month, said Putin’s Ukraine campaign had weakened his own position at home.

Germany, meanwhile, boosted Europe’s defences on its eastern flank facing Russia, announcing it would station a powerful 4,000-strong army brigade in Lithuania.

The Kremlin has warned the US and Britain they will be seen as ‘full-fledged’ participants in the war in Ukraine if Storm Shadow and HIMARS missiles are used to hit targets in Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea.

Vladimir Putin‘s defence minister Sergei Shoigu warned he will target ‘decision-making centres’ in Ukraine – implying he plans to order his military to target Volodymyr Zelensky and his government leaders in Kyiv.

Shoigu said: ‘According to our information, the leadership of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is planning to launch strikes on the territory of the Russian Federation, including Crimea, with HIMARS and Storm Shadow missiles.

‘The use of these missiles outside the area of the special military operation would mean a full-fledged involvement of the US and UK in the conflict entailing immediate strikes on the decision-making centres in Ukraine.’

His claim that Crimea is part of Russia is disputed by the West – and international law – which regards it as Ukrainian.

Putin forcibly annexed the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.

So far Ukraine has used long-range British-supplied Storm Shadow and US-provided HIMARS to hit targets in Russian-occupied areas of mainland Ukraine, not including Crimea.

Shoigu’s threat came as Russia admitted today that it had lost another colonel in an earlier Storm Shadow strike close to Crimea, on the Arabat Spit.

Col Sergei Postovalov, 53, is due to be buried tomorrow after he was fatally wounded in the 10 June strike which hit a Russian command post close to Henichesk minutes after Putin’s deputy premier Denis Manturov had visited.

Putin was reported to have visited the site in April.

Postovalov was a colonel in the Russian Interior Ministry forces.

His death follows the killing of Russian army Major-General Sergey Goryachev, 52, in a strike in annexed Zaporizhzhia region earlier this month – also seen as in a Storm Shadow attack carried out by Ukraine’s forces.

Shoigu is clearly rattled at the power of especially the Storm Shadow with a range of 155 miles, which has been fired from Ukrainian Su-24 war planes.

‘The Kyiv regime is employing a large number of Western weapons and elite formations whose personnel have been trained by NATO specialists,’ Shoigu told the collegium of the Russian defence ministry.

Last week, Yevgeny Balitsky, Moscow-appointed head of the occupied Zaporizhzhia region in Ukraine, admitted the weapons are causing ‘trouble’ and are even more problematic for the Kremlin’s armies than the US-supplied HIMARS systems.

His words confirm the impression that the long-range Storm Shadow has been a game changer for the Ukrainians as Kyiv launches its counteroffensive.

‘They certainly give us trouble with their missiles, I must say, especially Storm Shadow,’ said Balitsky.

‘We’ve somehow learned how to shoot down [US-supplied] HIMARS.

But the [British-supplied] Shadow ones are even harder. They arrive, and have a bigger radius. So it’s a problem for us.

‘In fact, our air defence is having a hard time with [Storm Shadow].

‘It shoots them down, but there’s only a 50 per cent chance of the missiles being shot down.’ 

He added: ‘Out of four, three have recently reached us.

‘Sometimes two make it. The missile is modern, although it is not the newest, but it is fast enough, it flies properly. I mean, at different speeds, at varying altitudes, changing modes, so it is not easy to shoot down.’

Britain announced the supply of Anglo-French-designed Storm Shadows to Ukraine on May 11, answering a long-time demand from Kyiv for long-range missiles to help defend their territory against Putin’s invading armies.

Storm Shadows have also struck occupied port cities Berdiansk and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, say reports. And the £2.2million-per-unit missiles were used to target Luhansk in the occupied Donbas.

The GPS-guided ground-hugging missiles with a 450kg warhead have a range of around 155 miles. The missiles allow Ukrainian forces to strike deeper into Russian-held territory than was previously possible.

Storm Shadow is a low-observable, long-range, air-launched cruise missile developed since 1994 by Matra and British Aerospace, and now manufactured by MBDA.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace previously confirmed the missiles had been used by Ukraine on May 18– but declined to give further details. 

He said the missiles gave the Ukrainians the ability to strike Russian command and control centres which had been moved further behind the front line to keep them out of range of the rocket artillery systems the West had supplied to Kyiv. 

Ukraine is the only country to be publicly supplied with these missiles by the UK.

Britain also became the first country to provide long-range precision missiles to Ukraine with the delivery.

They were also suspected to have been used this month when Russian MP Viktor Vodolatsky sustained injuries after an attack on May 15. 

The missiles were used for the first time operationally by UK forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where they were tested by the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron. 

The RAF and the French Air Force have used them against Isis. Britain also used them against Syrian forces in 2018.

A major Kremlin critic detained in Russia has been granted honorary Canadian citizenship in a bid to help win his freedom – prompting calls for the US and Britain to play their part to increase his chances of making it out alive. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a close ally of murdered opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, was jailed for 25 years on treason charges on April 17 this year after surviving two poisonings which left him in a coma in both 2015 and 2017. 

The 41-year-old British-Russian national also lived in Washington for at least a decade, and his wife Evgenia Kara-Murza is still based in the US with their three children aged 11, 14, and 17.  

After flying back to Russia at the outbreak of Putin‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year to oppose the war, he was detained on charges of treason and spreading false information about the Russian army via a process he described as a ‘show trial’. 

Kara-Murza’s close friend and activist, Bill Browder, told the Dailymail.com that the unanimous decision by Canadian parliament to grant him honorary citizenship on Thursday is ‘really important’ for his chances of being freed alive. 

Browder, an American-British businessman, added that this privilege has only been granted to seven people previously, including Nelson Mandela.  

Describing Kara-Murza as ‘the Russian equivalent of Nelson Mandela’, he explained: ‘He’s been given this really important recognition which will hopefully signal to the Russians that he shouldn’t be killed because he’s an important person that could be used to negotiate with in future.

‘There’s going to be a moment in time where there’s going to be a negotiation about different things between Putin and the West.

‘By giving him this status, by acknowledging his importance officially like this, it means his name will be high on the list when there are these negotiations and discussions taking place.’

The 59-year-old founder of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management said Kara-Murza has been given the ‘longest sentence of any political prisoner in Russia’ because he has been ‘so effective at upsetting Putin’.

‘They tried to kill him twice with poison in 2015 and 2017, and so (in the West) he’s really been acknowledged and recognized as the purest and most beloved Russian opposition politician to Putin,’ Browder said. 

‘He is the type of person that the West wants to lead Russia – when Putin is out or when the war is over – to lead it out of this terrible place that it’s in.’

Kara-Murza was also a key campaigner for Congress passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012 – a bill intending to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Browder’s company lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a prison in 2009. 

The Moscow-born politician was also highly instrumental in passing Canada’s equivalent Magnitsky Law in 2017.  

‘Vladimir has opposed the war, he’s criticized Putin, he’s been responsible for the Magnitsky Act being passed in 35 countries,’ Browder said. 

He added that the 25-year term which Kara-Murza is serving in a jail north of Moscow could be a ‘death sentence’ because he has already ‘lost more then 50 pounds’, and his health is still severely impacted by the poisonings.

His wife Evgenia also told Reuters in May that Russian authorities have been torturing him psychologically by denying him calls with his children. 

For this reason, Browder is among those urgently campaigning for the US and Britain to follow Canada’s example.  

In the US, this means adding him to the Levinson Act list of people officially recognized as being unlawfully detained, which was used to free American basketball player Brittney Griner from Russian jail last year.

‘This piece of legislation says if you get a special designation then the US government will use all of its resources to get you free,’ Browder said.

‘So, we’re in parallel conducting a campaign to get Vladimir Kara-Murza the designation of unlawfully detained in America, so that the US government joins in this effort.

‘We recently had 81 Members of Congress write a letter to the Secretary of State calling on him to get that designation.

‘Canada doesn’t have a Levinson Act, so honorary citizenship was as close as we’re going to get, which is very helpful.’

The fact there are two people jailed in Russia who are already listed as unlawfully detained – Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich – could be holding the US back from adding Kara-Murza to the list, according to Browder. 

Meanwhile, there are currently no other known Canadian or British citizens unlawfully detained in Russia. 

‘Thursday’s move by Canada lights the fire under the British government’s weir, because they need to be more active,’ Browder said. 

‘If the Canadians are ready to make him an honorary citizen, then it raises the question: what is the British government doing for him, when he is a legitimate British citizen?’

The UK Foreign Office (FCDO) has placed sanctions on three individuals involved in Kara-Murza’s arrest and two members of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, who followed him prior to the poisonings.

Those sanctioned for their involvement in Kara-Murza’s arrest have been named as Elena Lenskaya, the judge who approved the arrest, and investigators Denis Kolesnikov and Andrei Zadachin.

FSB agents Alexander Samofal and Konstantin Kudryavtsev have also been sanctioned, with the FCDO saying they were part of an ‘operational team’ that followed Kara-Murza on multiple trips before he was poisoned. 

The FCDO and the Canadian government has been approached for comment.