He leader of the Wagner Group will leave for Belarus, no criminal charges will be brought against any member of the paramilitary company and those brought against Yevgeni Prigozhin himself will be dropped. This was announced by the Kremlin after reaching an agreement with the mercenaries with the mediation of the Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, to stop their rebellion and their advance towards Moscow.

To questions from the press about the future of Prigozhin, the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dimitri Peskov, stated this Saturday night that “the criminal case against him will be withdrawn and he will go to Belarus” with the personal guarantee of Vladimir Putin. “If you ask me what kind of guarantee Prigozhin will have to go to Belarus, I will tell you that it is the word of the president of Russia,” he stressed.

Nor will the other mutineers be persecuted for their “merits at the front,” said the presidential spokesman, who in turn explained that Wagner’s combatants may sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense if they wish, as long as they did not participate in the uprising.

“An agreement has been reached for the Wagner Group to return to its headquarters, to its locations. Some of them who want it that way will sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense in the future. This is for those who did not participate in this ‘campaign,’ “he specified. This, despite the fact that Putin himself promised in his televised speech to the nation that the mutineers would answer for a rebellion which he called a “stab in the back”.

Prigozhin announced that his fighters would return to their bases to avoid “bloodshed”. “The time has come when blood can be shed. Therefore, realizing full responsibility for Russian blood being shed by one of the parties, our columns turn around and return to our bases according to plan,” he announced, after his men came within 200 kilometers of the capital.

The mercenaries had already left the southern city of Rostov-on-Don this Sunday morning, whose military headquarters they occupied after declaring themselves in absentia against the Russian command.

A mutiny that leaves Putin weakened

The uprising, in any case, leaves Putin’s image very touched, visibly weakened. In the opinion of Professor Pedro Rodríguez, “Putin’s image as super cool, infallible and all-powerful is over“. “In this environment of authoritarian regimes, the appearance of weakness is lethal”, stressed the expert in the Sixth Explica, where he compared the situation with the coup against Gorbachev. An analysis that you can listen to under these lines.