During Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed rebellion in Russia, the US government reached Ukrainian officials on a number of different levels, cautioning them to resist taking advantage of the chaos to strike inside Russia, according to a Western official, CNN reports.
“The message was don’t rock the boat here,” the official said, adding that the message was transmitted at the foreign minister level, deputies and through ambassadors.
“It’s an internal Russian matter,” the Ukrainian officials were told, echoing what US and other Western officials have said publicly. “Ukrainians were being cautioned by allies not to provoke the situation. Make hay of opportunities on Ukrainian territory but don’t get drawn into internal matters or strike at offensive military assets inside of Russia.”
Moreover, US officials were reinforcing to the Russian government privately that the US had nothing to do with the uprising — and urging them to maintain the safety and security of their nuclear arsenal, officials said.
Axios reported earlier, citing its sources, that after PMC Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin had announced the mercenary group’s “march of justice” in the late hours of 23 June, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed all State Department staff to not talk about the uprising in order to make sure no US diplomat said anything that could have made it seem the US was involved in the crisis in any way.
US President Joe Biden commented on Prigozhin’s rebellion in the late hours of 26 June, making it clear the United States had nothing to do with it. Biden referred to what was happening as “part of a struggle within the Russian system”.