The President of Russia, Vladimir Putinassured this Tuesday that the financing of the Wagner Group, which rebelled against the Russian military leadership last weekend, was fully borne by the state budget.
(It may be of interest to you: The head of the Wagner group assures that his militias crossed the Russian border).
“The maintenance of the Wagner Group was fully the responsibility of the State, the Ministry of Defense and the state coffers
“The Wagner Group was fully maintained by the state, the Defense Ministry and the state coffers,” Putin told a meeting with Russian soldiers in the Kremlin.
“We fully fund that group“, insisted the Russian president this Tuesday, June 27.
Putin specified that only “between May 2022 and May 2023, the State allocated 86 billion rubles (about 1,014 million dollars) for the maintenance of the Wagner Group”, a private military company that is illegal in Russia.
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Meanwhile, the owner of the Concord company and Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, earned 80 billion rubles in one year (about 945 million dollars) for supplying food to the Russian Army, he said.
“I hope that no one has stolen anything or has stolen little. But, without a doubt, we are going to take care of that,” he said, hinting at an investigation into the use of public money by the Wagnerites who had been fighting the war for 16 months in Ukraine to rise up against the Russian military leadership.
Putin spoke of a possible civil war in Russia
In addition, Vladimir Putin congratulated the members of the Russian Army who managed to prevent a ‘civil war’, after the Wagner Group declared the rebellion of its mercenaries, who were heavily armed and arrived a few kilometers from Moscow, the capital of Russia.
(Read here: President Lukashenko’s harsh warning: ‘If Russia collapses, we will all die’).
The Russian president stressed, at the military ceremony, that his soldiers they controlled the uprising of the armed group and made them return to their bases by order of the chief (Yevgueni Prigozhin).
“You opposed these riots, the result of which would inevitably have been chaos (…) In practice, they avoided a civil war,” Vladimir Putin said in the middle of his speech in which he called for a minute’s silence for the pilots killed in combat during the Wagner Group rebellion.
El Universal (Mexico) / GDA
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