WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said Monday that neither the U.S. nor its military allies had any role in the aborted mutiny in Russia, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin has ‘no excuse’ to blame the West.
As the crisis unfolded over the weekend, Biden said he met virtually with U.S. allies to discuss a coordinated approach.
“They agreed with me that we had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse…to blame this on the West or to blame this on NATO,” Biden told reporters. “We made clear that we were not involved, we had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT television Monday that Russian security services “are already looking into” whether there was any kind of involvement by the West in the brief revolt by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary group. Lavrov provided no evidence of Western involvement.
The Wagner paramilitary group has fought alongside Russia’s regular army in Ukraine. On Saturday, Prigozhin said his fighters were heading toward Moscow. They abruptly reversed course under what Priogozhin said was an agreement brokered by the leader of Belarus to avoid Russian bloodshed.
Biden, in his first public remarks on the situation in Russia, said it is still “too early” to determine the reverberations of the attempted coup.
“We’re going to keep assessing the fallout of this weekend’s events and the implications for Russia and Ukraine,” Biden said. “But it’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going.”
He said he will be speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a second time soon. The U.S. president said he emphasized to Zelenskyy in their weekend call that the U.S. would continue to support Ukraine’s defense and sovereignty no matter what happens in Russia.
Biden said that when the chaos began, he directed his national security team to report back to him “hour by hour” and to “prepare for a range of scenarios.” He did not detail their assessments in his Monday remarks.
