Russia’s defense minister appeared in public for the first time since this weekend’s dramatic armed rebellion that sought to oust him from power and became 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 morning. It was not immediately clear where or when the video was taken, but his appearance was the first public display by a senior Russian official since Wagner’s short-lived 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 on Moscow but left great uncertainty about Russia’s future.
The footage showed Shoigu traveling on a plane and attending a meeting with the leaders of the Russian invasion. He was told of the «high efficiency» of the Russian military in «detecting and destroying enemy military equipment and personnel buildups in tactical areas,» according to Zvezda, the Defense Ministry TV channel that published the footage.
Putin, meanwhile, has not come out into the open, apart from a televised address to the nation on Saturday in which he compared the situation to the 1917 Russian revolution and called for 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 the Ukraine, but Prigozhin has grown increasingly hostile towards his own country’s military. He blamed Shoigu and other top commanders for bungling the war, announcing late Friday that his troops would leave Ukraine to return home and try to oust the defense minister.
That quickly escalated into a direct confrontation with Moscow, when Prigozhin and his men descended on Moscow after Putin denounced the move as a stab in the back.
Then suddenly they turned around, the product of an alleged deal with the Kremlin that would see Prigozhin go to Belarus and drop charges against his fighters, whom Putin had accused hours earlier of treason.
On Sunday night, 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.