US, allies not involved in uprising against Kremlin, says Biden

WASHINGTON/ MOSCOW: US President Joe Biden on Monday said a brief uprising by Russian mercenaries against the Kremlin was part of a struggle within the Russian system and the Washington and its allies were not involved in it.

“We made clear we were not involved, we had nothing to do with this,” Biden said in his first comments on the uprising by Wagner mercenaries that fizzled over the weekend.

At a White House event, Biden addressed the dramatic power struggle that erupted over the weekend when the mutineers barrelled toward Moscow only to stop before reaching the capital.

Russian intelligence services were investigating whether Western spy agencies played a role in the aborted mutiny, the TASS news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying on Monday.

Biden said he spoke with key allies on a video conference to make sure everyone was on the same page and coordinated in their response.

Putin’s former ‘puppet master’ urges an end to mercenary groups like Wagner

“They agreed with me that we had to make sure that we gave (Russian President Vladimir) Putin no excuse — gave Putin no excuse — to blame this on the West and blame this on Nato,” he said.

He said he and his team would continue assessing the fallout from the incident. “It’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going,” he added.

President Vladimir Putin’s former chief strategist on Monday urged an end to mercenary groups in Russia after a mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner militia, cautioning that they interfered with the chain of command.

Private military idea imported from US

Vladislav Surkov, once known as the Kremlin’s puppet master by friends and foes alike, said “private military companies” were an idea imported from the US, created to engage in proxy wars.

“How can a military unit be private in our understanding? This is completely inconsistent with Russian political, managerial and military culture,” Surkov, who left the Kremlin in 2020, said in an interview published by his associate Alexei Chesnakov.

Such groups, Surkov said, risked turning Russia into “some kind of Eurasian tribal zone” while dividing the command of the armed forces as Russia fought what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” (SVO) in Ukraine.

“Why do we need them today when we are openly participating in the battle for Ukraine? This is not a proxy war, this is the SVO,” Surkov said.

“The army must be strengthened not only with weapons, but also with unity of command.”

As first deputy chief of the Kremlin administration from 1999 to 2011, Surkov helped Putin forge his tightly controlled political system.

Prigozhin said that a one-day mutiny by his Wagner force had been intended not to overthrow Russia’s government but to register a protest over what he said was its ineffectual conduct of the war in Ukraine.

“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 30 of its men, and said this had been the immediate trigger for what he called a “march of justice”.