No winners in Wagner's aborted mutiny

Shaken by the Wagner mutiny, Russia began addressing the damage of Saturday's bout of violence as its citizens tried to understand how these events will affect President Vladimir Putin's regime, which has shown itself so unexpectedly vulnerable.

- Yaroslav Trofimov

The whereabouts of Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin were unclear on Sunday, and neither he nor Putin made public remarks about the conditions under which the rebellion ended. The Russian minister of defense and the head of Russia's armed forces also remained out of sight.

One widely shared conclusion in Russia, however, was that none of the key players in the power struggle that began when Prigozhin seized the southern city of Rostov on Saturday morning has been strengthened by the ordeal that brought the country to the edge of civil war.

Putin, who earlier in the day demanded his security forces to crush what he described as a treasonous mutiny, amnestied Prigozhin and his men by the evening, after Belarus President Aleksander Lukashenko negotiated a face-saving compromise.

Prigozhin, who showed Wagner's strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile in Belarus. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner. Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway.

"The entire system has lost yesterday, including Prigozhin, who is also part of the system," said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who was in Moscow on Saturday. As for Putin, he added, "it turned out that the czar is not a real czar because he couldn't control a man from his own system who's supposed to be under his full control."