Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, issued a statement Monday for the first time since the group paused its march on Moscow.

In the eleven-minute video message, Prigozhin argued that the military operation highlighted “serious security problems across our country,” but sought to distance the Wagner Group from accusations that the action constituted a coup.

“It was never our goal to overthrow the current regime and legally-elected government,” Prigozhin said, according to a translation by an intelligence monitoring account, OSINT Defender.

The militia commander emphasized that he turned his troops back toward Ukraine before engaging with any Russian troops.

“We turned around in order not to shed the blood of Russian soldiers,” he said.

“We started our march because of injustice. On the way, we did not kill a single soldier on the ground. In a day, we were only 200 km away from Moscow. We entered and completely took control of the city of Rostov. The civilians were glad to see us,” he added. “The goal was to prevent the destruction of Wagner and bring responsibility to people who made a lot of mistakes. We determined that the demonstration up to that point was sufficient.”

Late Saturday, Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko announced a last-minute brokered deal between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin to avert armed conflict. The agreement reportedly will prevent “a bloodbath on the territory of Russia,” Lukashenko said, arguing the deal is “absolutely advantageous and acceptable” for Wagner, without referencing specific details.

Prigozhin confirmed the arrangement in an audio statement that night, explaining that Wagner forces were “turning around our columns and returning to field camps according to plan.” He has left Russia for Belarus, with all pending criminal charges to be dropped.

President Joe Biden also made his first public comments since the armed rebellion on Monday, confirming that neither the United States nor NATO had any involvement in the upheaval. “[W]e gave Putin no excuse to blame this on the West, to blame this on NATO. 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,” the president said during a press conference on Monday.

“I also talked at length with President [Volodymyr] Zelensky of Ukraine. We’ll be keeping in contact with him,” he added. “I told him that no matter what happened in Russia, we the United States, will continue to support Ukraine’s defense and its sovereignty and its territorial integrity.”