Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on Monday hailed revolt against President Vladimir Putin-led government saying that it exposed the weaknesses of the Russian military leadership.

In a first audio message since calling off his troops´ advance on Moscow, the Wagner chief defended his aborted mutiny saying it was an attempt to save his mercenary outfit and not to challenge the Kremlin.

The audio message was released as Russian officials attempted to present the public with a return to business as usual.

Prigozhin, who did not reveal from where he was speaking, said in an online audio message that his revolt was intended to prevent his Wagner force from being dismantled, and bragged that the ease with which it had advanced on Moscow exposes “serious security problems”.

The mercenary leader, a former close ally of Putin, has a long-standing feud with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and has demanded they be sacked over the conduct of the Ukraine campaign.

“We went to demonstrate our protest and not to overthrow power in the country,” Prigozhin said, boasting that his men had “blocked all military infrastructure” including air bases along their route towards a point less than 200 kilometres from Moscow.

Belarus option for Wagner?

Prighozin called off the advance, and pulled out of a military base his men had seized in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, a nerve centre of the war in Ukraine, late on Saturday after mediation efforts from Belarus´ strongman Alexander Lukashenko.

He did not say where he had recorded Monday´s message, but he explained that Lukashenko had offered him a way of keeping the Wagner outfit — a key element in Russia´s military machine in Ukraine and in African and Middle East hotspots — operational.

“Lukashenko held out his hand and offered to find solutions for the continuation of the work of the Wagner private military company in a legal jurisdiction,” Prigozhin said.

Saturday´s extraordinary sequence of events — Russian military bloggers report that Wagner shot down six Russian helicopters and a command and control plane during their advance — has been seen internationally as Russia´s most serious security crisis in decades.

But Prigozhin insisted the revolt was designed “to demonstrate our protest, and not to overthrow power in the country” and claimed civilian supporters had turned out along the column´s route to wave patriotic flags and Wagner symbols.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, was at pains to stress that there had been a return to normal, having announced at the weekend that Prigozhin would be permitted to seek exile in Belarus and that there would be a general amnesty for his troops.