We had nothing to do with Wagner's coup attempt, says Joe Biden

Vladimir Putin spoke on Russian TV on Monday

Joe Biden said the US and its Western allies had nothing to do with the attempt coup d'état by Russian mercenaries who intended to overhaul the country's military leadership.

«We have nothing to do with this,» the US president told reporters on Monday in his first comments about the uprising.

Mr. Biden said he held talks with key Washington allies over Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's refusal to put pressure on Moscow, during which officials agreed not to give Vladimir Putin «no excuses…blame the West for it and blame it for NATO». .

On Monday evening, Putin called the Wagnerites patriots and thanked them for backing down, but added that «any blackmail is doomed to fail.»

Earlier yesterday, the Russian cabinet was urged to rally around the president and the state. Media reported that Prigozhin was still facing mutiny charges despite apparently making a deal with Moscow on Saturday night to end his mutiny.

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“We need to act together as a team and keep all forces united by rallying around the president,” Mikhail Mishustin, who heads Putin’s cabinet as his appointed prime minister, said at a televised government meeting .

In another move that was apparently intended to show normalcy, the authorities released a video showing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, a longtime Putin ally.

The footage shows him flying into plane with a colleague and listens to reports at the command post without specifying when and where it was filmed. Prigozhin demanded the resignation of Shoigu after a series of military failures in Ukraine.

In an 11-minute audio message posted on Monday, he did not repeat his call for Shoigu to be fired as he sought to make peace with the Kremlin, presenting his rebellion as a series of lessons that could help the country.

He also did not comment on Russian state media reports that he continues to face treason charges, despite Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying on Saturday they would be dropped in exchange for sending Prigozhin into exile in Belarus.

On Sunday, several well-known pro-war Russian bloggers expressed concern that Prigozhin might get away with it after his fighter jets shot down several Russian planes, killing more than a dozen pilots.

At the same time, a former senior Defense Minister official said on Monday that it is time to forgive and forget the Wagner fighters who are wreaking havoc in southern Russia on Saturday.

“They didn't hurt anyone. They didn't break anything. No one has the slightest problem with them — neither the Rostovite, nor the Russian military, nor the law enforcement agencies, ”the official said.

At a television meeting of the Russian government, Tatyana Golikova, Deputy Prime Minister of Social Policy offered support to Putin while looking visibly upset. She said: «The youth and employees of our companies supported the president of our country.»

But even Kremlin supporters, such as political scientist and former deputy Sergei Markov, had to admit that Wagner's campaign against Moscow exposed fundamental problems in the Russian system of governance.

“More support for Putin, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with the realization that the country must move in the wrong direction if a rebellion occurs,” he wrote on his Telegram channel .

Meanwhile, Russian newspapers rarely expressed direct criticism of the authorities, in one of the Moscow headlines it was said that Russia had shown «its vulnerability — to the whole world and to itself.»< /p>