Prigozhin said he was turning his columns back to the camps
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the private military company Wagner, said he was deploying columns of his fighters, who intended to march on Moscow and had already seized some 5,000 kilometres of Russian territory.
A corresponding audio recording has appeared on the official Wagner PMC Telegram channel.
In it, Prigozhin states that they started the march because they were planning to disband. They did not reach 200 kilometres to Moscow and "did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters.
But now the moment has come when blood can be spilled. (...) We are turning back our columns and marching back to the field camps as planned," the record says.
As we know, during the riot the Wagner PMC took control of almost 5 thousand square kilometres of the Russian Federation.
In Rostov, key military facilities were taken without resistance, while in Moscow they began to prepare for a siege. There were also reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had fled the capital.
Earlier, the Russian Telegram channel "Can explain" said that the Russian authorities were discussing the possibility of declaring martial law in the country. Allegedly, senators have been warned to come to an emergency meeting and the Russian Defence Ministry is withdrawing troops from the front lines in many directions and sending them to Moscow, Rosvoenkorps reported. There is no official confirmation of the information.