Secretary of State Anthony Blinken demanded his staff only say that Washington is monitoring the situation, a source told the outlet
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken © AFP / Leah Millis
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued an urgent cable on Friday night, telling American officials around the globe not to speak about the failed armed rebellion by the Wagner private military company in Russia, sources told Axios.
US diplomats were only allowed to say that Washington was monitoring the events if asked about the issue by foreign governments, the outlet reported on Tuesday.
According to unnamed officials, the message from Blinken stressed that the situation had been dealt with directly by the secretary of state and his closest staff.
The impression among those who received the directive was that Washington had been trying to make sure that American diplomats wouldn’t say anything that would make it look like the US was somehow involved in the crisis, one of the sources said.
“The unusual cable… showed the level of alarm in the Biden administration about the developments in Russia,” Axios wrote.
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Speaking to ABC on Sunday, Blinken said the mutiny by Wagner was “fundamentally an internal matter for the Russians.” The actions of the private military company were “a direct challenge to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s authority,” he claimed, adding that “we’ve seen real cracks emerge.”
The Wagner Group, which was fighting on Russia’s side in the conflict in Ukraine and was instrumental to the capture of the strategic city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) in May, launched a mutiny late on Friday. The head of the PMC, Evgeny Prigozhin, says he ordered the insurrection because the Defense Ministry “wanted to disband Wagner.” The rebelling troops seized control of the Russian military’s Southern District headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don and sent an armed convoy towards Moscow.
The revolt came to a halt on Saturday night as Prigozhin announced that his men would be returning to their field camps following talks with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. According to Minsk, the negotiations took place in close coordination with Putin.
The Kremlin said Prigozhin would leave Russia and “go to Belarus” under the terms of an agreement. The criminal case against him will be dropped, and Wagner fighters who took part in the mutiny will also avoid prosecution, it added.
READ MORE: Putin seals Wagner’s fate
President Putin said in his televised address on Monday that most of the Wagner troops were patriots, who had been deliberately misled by the organizers of the insurrection. The soldiers now have a choice of signing a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry and other security agencies, returning home, or moving to Belarus, he said.
