Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group claimed that he did not intend to overthrow the government in Russia, in the first audio message since calling his forces to revolt on Saturday.
Prigozhin claimed that his call had been intended to register a protest at the ineffectual conduct of the war in Ukraine, not to overthrow the government in Moscow.
Prigozhin spoke in an 11-minute audio message released on the Telegram messaging app.
"We went to demonstrate our protest and not to overthrow power in the country," Prigozhin said in the first audio message since calling off the Wagner march at the weekend.
He noted that the march on Moscow over the weekend had shown up "very serious security problems" in Russia.
He said the way it had been able to seize the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don without bloodshed and to send an armed convoy to within 200 km of Moscow had been testament to the effectiveness of his fighters.
"We showed a master class, as it should have been on Feb. 24, 2022. We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government," he said in an 11-minute audio message released on the Telegram messaging app.
Prigozhin renewed an allegation, so far unsupported by evidence, that the Russian military had attacked a Wagner camp with missiles and then helicopters, killing about 1,000 of its men, and said this had been the immediate trigger for what he called a "march of justice."
Wagner stopped its advance toward Moscow at the moment when it realized that it would have to confront waiting Russian troops, and that blood would inevitably be shed, he said, reiterating an assertion he made on Saturday.
Prigozhin, a former close ally of President Vladimir Putin, stressed that Wagner had not spilt a drop of blood on the ground during its northward march, but regretted that his fighters had had to kill Russian servicemen who attacked their convoy from helicopters.
He also once more complained about a military order that all volunteer units including Wagner are meant to sign by July 1 placing themselves under the control of Russia's Defense Ministry.
Fewer than 2% of Wagner's men have signed up, Prigozhin added.
"The aim of the march was to avoid the destruction of Wagner," he said.
In the recording, Prigozhin did not address any of the questions still surrounding the agreement brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that brought the mutiny to an end.
The Kremlin said on Saturday that the deal had included dropping a criminal case against Prigozhin and his moving to Belarus.
Prigozhin, who was last seen in public being driven in a sport utility vehicle out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening, did not say where he was when he recorded his statement.
Belarusian President Lukashenko has proposed ways in which Russia's Wagner mercenary group could continue to operate, Prighozin said in the audio recording
"Lukashenko held out his hand and offered to find solutions for the continuation of the work of the Wagner private military company in a legal jurisdiction," Prigozhin said.
