Moscow (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin aimed to rally Russia’s military and security services Tuesday, telling them they halted a slide into civil war when Wagner mercenaries rebelled and marched on Moscow.

As Russia announced preparations to disarm Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private force, Putin and his supporters were insisting his rule was not weakened by the revolt widely seen as the biggest threat to Kremlin authority since he came to power.

Asked whether Putin’s power was diminished by the sight of rebel mercenaries seizing a military HQ, advancing on Moscow and shooting down military aircraft along the way, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We don’t agree.”

Putin himself, attempted to portray the dramatic events at the weekend as a victory for the Russian regular military which has shown restraint in not being drawn into fighting with the Wagner force.

“You de facto stopped civil war,” Putin told troops from the defence ministry, National Guard, FSB security service and interior ministry gathered for a televised address in a Kremlin courtyard and a minute’s silence for airmen slain by Wagner.

“In the confrontation with rebels, our comrades-in-arms, pilots, were killed. They did not flinch and honourably fulfilled their orders and their military duty,” Putin said.

- Private army -

Prigozhin, a former Kremlin ally and catering contractor who built Russia’s most powerful private army, has boasted – with some support from news footage – that his men were cheered and welcomed by civilians during his short-lived revolt.

But Putin insisted that Wagner’s ordinary fighters had seen that “the army and the people were not with them.”

Russian officials have been trying to put the crisis behind them for three days, with Prigozhin due to go into exile in Belarus, the FSB dropping charges against rank-and-file Wagner troopers and the military preparing to disarm the group.

“Preparations are underway for the transfer of heavy military equipment from the private military company Wagner to units of the Russian armed forces,” the defence ministry said.

But, even if the immediate security threat of Prigozhin’s feud with the defence ministry is over, the Kremlin faces questions over how it handled the issue and allowed the violence of its operation in Ukraine to spill back into the heart of Russia.

Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko, usually seen as a junior partner to Putin, is seeking credit for stepping in to mediate Wagner’s U-turn on the road to Moscow and by Tuesday he has criticised Russia’s handling of the issue.

The feud between Wagner and the army had escalated for months, with Prigozhin making increasingly scathing statements against the generals’ handling of the offensive in Ukraine, blaming them for thousands of Russian losses.

“We missed the situation, and then we thought that it would resolve itself, but it did not resolve,” Lukashenko said.

“Two people who fought at the front clashed, there are no heroes in this case,” he added, in an apparent reference to the Wagner chief and his rival, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Lukashenko said he had ordered Belarus’s army to combat readiness in case of disaster in its larger neighbour and main ally, adding that if Russia had collapsed “we would all die”.

Some in the West have expressed concern that Wagner’s revolt could plunge Russia into chaos and endanger the security of its nuclear arsenal, but the NATO leader most sympathetic to Putin – Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban – poured cold water on that idea.

- ‘Heroic fight’ -

Speaking to German media outlets, Orban said the revolt held “no major significance” and said of Putin: “If someone speculates that he could fail or be replaced, then he does not understand the Russian people and Russian power structures.”

In his address, Putin also stressed that the revolt had not forced Russia to withdraw any of its units from Ukraine, where fighting continued as Kyiv’s brigades pursued their counteroffensive in their nation’s east and south.

“All military formations continued to wage a heroic fight at the front,” Putin noted.

The bloody conflict is now 16 months old, with mass casualties on both sides and a rising civilian toll.

On Tuesday, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it had evidence that Russian troops had summarily executed at least 77 detained civilians.

“It is a war crime… it’s also a gross violation of international human rights law,” said Matilda Bogner, head of the mission.

Pope Francis’s peace envoy to Ukraine will visit Moscow on Wednesday and Thursday, just weeks after visiting Kyiv, the Vatican said, the first visit to Moscow by a senior Vatican official since Russia launched an all-out assault in February 2022.