Vladimir Putin last night insisted that a bloody civil war has been averted after the ‘failed’ Wagner coup, which stunned the country with an aborted march on Moscow over the weekend.
In a short pre-recorded TV address, the warmonger accused Ukraine and its Western allies of wanting Russians to ‘kill each other’, and denounced Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers as ‘criminals’ and warned he would bring them to ‘justice’.
Putin then claimed that Ukraine and the West hoped that the rebellion would lead to civil war in Russia, in baseless remarks which appeared to suggest he was accusing Kyiv and its allies of having a part in the extraordinary weekend developments.
The president attempted to reassure Russians that a civil war had been avoided and that the Kremlin was back in control of the country.
In a desperate bid to assert his authority, the despot snarled: ‘From the start of the events, on my orders steps were taken to avoid large-scale bloodshed.
‘It was precisely this fratricide that Russia’s enemies wanted: both the neo-Nazis in Kyiv and their Western patrons, and all sorts of national traitors. They wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other.’
