Russia’s defense minister has appeared in public for the first time since this weekend’s dramatic armed rebellion that sought to oust him from power and developed into the biggest challenge to President Vladimir Putin in more than 20 years of rule.
Sergei Shoigu was shown visiting troops involved in the fighting in Ukraine in a video released by his ministry early Monday. It was not immediately clear where or when the video was taken, but his emergence was the first public showing by a top Russian official since the short-lived Wagner mercenary revolt.
There was still no sign of Putin or Yevgeny Prigozhin, however, after an apparent Kremlin deal ended a march by thousands of rebels toward Moscow but left grave uncertainty about Russia’s future.
The footage showed Shoigu traveling in an aircraft and attending a meeting with the leaders of Russia’s invasion. He was told about the Russian army’s “high efficiency” at “detecting and destroying enemy military equipment and accumulations of personnel in tactical areas,” according to Zvezda, the defense ministry’s television channel that released the footage.
Putin, meanwhile, has not surfaced — aside from a televised speech to the nation Saturday in which he likened the situation to the Russian revolution of 1917 and called for the mercenaries to be “neutralized.”
Similarly there was no sign of the man at the center of the drama, Prigozhin.
Wagner has been responsible for some of Russia’s few victories in Ukraine, but Prigozhin has grown increasingly hostile toward his own country’s army. He blamed Shoigu and other top brass for botching the war, and announced late Friday that his troops would be leaving Ukraine to return home and effectively try to depose the defense minister.
That quickly turned into a direct confrontation with Moscow, as Prigozhin and his men bore down on Moscow after Putin denounced the move as a stab in the back.
Then, they suddenly turned back, the product of a purported deal with the Kremlin that would see Prigozhin leave for Belarus and the charges dropped against his fighters — who Putin had hours earlier accused of treason.
Late Sunday Prigozhin was filmed leaving Rostov-on-Don, the southern Russian city where his men had captured strategic buildings. But that was the last time he was seen in public.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
