The head of the private Russian military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, will move to neighbouring Belarus as part of a deal to defuse rebellion tensions and the criminal case against him will be closed, the Kremlin said.

On Saturday, a brief revolt by Wagner Group soldiers under Prigozhin’s command  moved unimpeded into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced hundreds of kilometres toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital.

The deal was mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Under the terms of the agreement, Prigozhin will go to neighbouring Belarus, which has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped.

In allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, Peskov said, Putin’s “highest goal” was “to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results.” 

The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defence Ministry. 

Putin had vowed earlier to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protégé. In a televised speech to the nation, he called the rebellion a “betrayal” and “treason.

The deal appeared to defuse a dramatically escalating crisis that represented the most significant challenge to President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power.

After the agreement, Prigozhin announced that his men were only 200 kilometres from Moscow but that he had decided to ask them to return to Ukraine to avoid “spilling Russian blood”.

On Saturday morning, Prigozhin’s private army appeared to control military installations in Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of Russian operations in Ukraine.

But the target was Moscow’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom he had harshly criticised for his conduct of the war in Ukraine.