Russian President Vladimir Putin made no mention of the armed mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group as he on Monday made his first statement since the incident.
In a video issued via the Kremlin website on Monday, the president instead congratulated participants of an industrial forum.
The clip contained no indication of when or where it had been filmed.
Putin made a national address to the Russian people on Saturday, in which he condemned the mutiny by Wagner mercenaries as a “stab in the back” and vowed to crush it.
He has not commented publicly on the subsequent deal, announced late on Saturday, that appeared to defuse the crisis and avert possible bloodshed by allowing the Wagner fighters to return to base and their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to move to Belarus.
As of Monday, there had still been no public sign of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of Wagner and mutiny leader. He was last seen on Saturday smiling in the back of an SUV as he left the southern city of Rostov-On-Don, captured by his men before he ordered them to stand down.
Russia’s national Anti-Terrorism Committee said the situation in the country was stable. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who had told residents to stay indoors on Saturday as the mutinous fighters raced to within a few hundred kilometres of the capital, said he was cancelling a counter-terrorism security regime.
Prigozhin and his fighters had been offered immunity from prosecution in return for their withdrawal. But despite the Kremlin saying over the weekend that charges would be dropped, state controlled news agencies reported on Monday that the criminal case against Prigozhin remained open and was still being pursued.
Saturday’s extraordinary events left governments - both friendly and hostile to Russia - groping for answers as to what had happened behind the scenes and what could come next.
On Monday Sir Alex Younger, the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6, said Putin’s authority had been “significantly weakened” by the Wagner Group rebellion.
Read More
He said Prigozhin’s “impetuous” decision to march his forces into Rostov and then towards Moscow had little chance of succeeding, but had undermined the Russian president.
