THE mutiny by the Wagner Group against Putin was not a coup attempt, according to the former head of counter-terrorism at the Ministry of Defence.

Major General Chip Chapman said the mercenaries’ march on Moscow appeared to be a protest to prevent the group being absorbed into the Russian military next month.

He told GB News: “I don’t think it was a coup attempt. It’s completely different from what Prigozhin did, he miscalculated and overreached.

“What Prigozhin tried to do was threefold. He had three objectives. The first one is that he sought to remove Shoigu and Gerasimov.

“He’s been railing against them for a number of months that he, particularly when he was in a bad mood and has not been getting the resources to prosecute his successful part of the war, as he saw it.

“The second thing was that he wanted strategically to get Putin to prosecute the war better and more efficiently. He wants to see more ways of mobilisation of manpower and the industrial base ramped up.”

In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he continued: “The third one is he sought to maintain the Wagner Group independent of the Russian MoD. They were due to sign a contract by the first of July. He didn’t want that to happen so he could keep his independence.

“So it wasn’t a coup. It was supposed to be leverage, he overreached. The problem for Putin is that he did nothing for three months when Prigozhin was pushing the boundaries. It undermines Putin’s domestic authority and standing and that’s the weakness he’s shown.

“You can’t in one minute say that he’s a traitor, he’s going to be crushed and then the next minute do a deal with him, when at the same time you’ve had nine aircraft shot down by the Wagner group which was 6% of all the combat losses.”

He added: “You’ll see a Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the next week or two by Putin to get rid of those recalcitrants who favoured Prigozhin and his march on Moscow.

“But you don’t run a coup by telegraphing that you’re hundreds of miles away without decapitating the leader and taking over the organs of the media, so it wasn’t a coup in the slightest.”