Kremlin ceremony mocked by Russian military bloggers

Influential Russian military bloggers have questioned Moscow's response to the Saturday (June 24) Wagner Group mutiny, and mocked a recent ceremony that Russian President Vladimir Putin staged.

In an extraordinary series of events last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group, which had for months led an assault in eastern Ukraine, mutinied and threatened to attack Moscow, before reversing course.

Some bloggers saw the extraordinary march and the Kremlin's promise not to punish the rebels as a sign of a weakness.

"Where is the leadership of the defence ministry when an armed unit is approaching Moscow?" wrote military correspondent Yuri Kotenok.

Since the mutiny, Putin has addressed the nation several times in an apparent attempt to show he was in control all along.

But the Tuesday ceremony, which saw Putin standing on a red carpet and thanking the troops and police who attended for averting the rebellion, was mocked online.

Wagner fighters captured several military sites, including Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, before continuing their march on Moscow.

"Officers of the headquarters of the Southern Military District, who abandoned the headquarters in seconds and [expletive] themselves at the mere sight of the Wagnerites, yesterday put themselves forward for state awards," said the Battle_Z_Sailor Telegram channel, which has 63,000 followers.

The channel accused military police and special forces guarding the headquarters of disappearing during the mutiny, "leaving the conscripts at the gate".

Another popular Telegram channel, Govorit TopaZ, which has almost 100,000 followers, also took issue with the ceremony.

"In the Kremlin now they are literally rewarding and praising people who had nothing to do with the bloodless solution of the conflict," it said.

The channel criticised the authorities for "not saying a single word about what led to the mutiny".

In the months before launching his mutiny, Prigozhin had increasingly accused the Russian high command of incompetence in Ukraine.

Prigozhin aimed to capture Russian generals: report

The Wagner Group leader aimed to detain the commanders of the Russian military in last week's mutiny, but they discovered his planned rebellion early and avoided capture, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The newspaper cited Western officials saying that Prigozhin sought to seize archrivals Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, and chief of staff General Valery Gerasimov while they were on a visit to the south.

But the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) learned of the plan and Shoigu and Gerasimov changed their travel, the Journal said, citing unnamed officials.

That switch forced Prigozhin to change plans. Early on Saturday his Wagner forces seized control of the headquarters of the Southern Military District, a key logistics and command centre for the war on Ukraine.

US officials have told media that they knew days ahead about the planned uprising, in which Prigozhin sent a column of forces from his privately run army toward Moscow before giving up as Putin branded the group "traitors".

Also citing unnamed US officials, the New York Times reported that senior Gen. Sergei Surovikin knew in advance of Prigozhin's mutiny plans.

The advance knowledge by top military officials could have prevented potential allies of Prigozhin and Wagner from joining the revolt, contributing to its failure.