Putin ‘appeared nervous’ in speech denouncing Wagner Group

Russian President Vladimir Putin looked “nervous and almost rattled” Saturday when he delivered a speech as Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin closed in on Moscow — and shouldn’t rest easy even after the mercenary leader called off the march on the capital, experts told The Post.

The Russian president “looked like someone who was not completely in control of the situation,” said Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute.

“He used all the right words, but looking at his mannerisms, he looked nervous and almost rattled,” Coffey added.

In a televised address to his nation, the dictator promised to quash the Wagner Group’s “armed insurrection,” branding the mutiny as “treason” and a “stab in the back.”

The Russian strongman ripped the rebellion by the mercenary group, which had been assisting Moscow’s soldiers in the Ukraine, as undermining the united front necessary to continue the ongoing bloody conflict.

“This battle, where the fate of our people is being decided, requires all our forces to be united; unity, consolidation and responsibility,” Putin said in the nearly six-minute speech.

“Everything that weakens us must be put to the side, any differences that may be used or are used by our enemies to disrupt us from within.”

Putin — who did not mention Prigozhin by name — said that personal ambitions and interests had “led to treason,” and called the attack a betrayal of the country, people and cause that the mercenary soldiers had been fighting for.

“It’s a blow against Russia, against our people. And our actions to defend the fatherland from such a threat will be brutal,” Putin said.

“All those who deliberately stepped on the path of betrayal, who prepared an armed insurrection, who took the path of blackmail and terrorist methods, will suffer inevitable punishment, will answer both to the law and to our people,” the strongman proclaimed.

Putin’s statement came hours after Prigozhin announced that 25,000 of his mercenary group’s soldiers had seized the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, where the military headquarters of the country’s southern region is located.

Prigozhin said Friday that the uprising was sparked after Russian soldiers attacked and killed his men in Ukraine.

The Wagner Group leader has bashed Russia’s military leadership — particularly Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian Army Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov — for months over their handling of the Ukraine war.

But later Saturday, Prigozhian announced that his soldiers were abandoning their march on Moscow and returning to their barracks amid news of a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Coffey said the turmoil within Russia was likely “far from over.”

“The idea that Wagner can do what it did and then everything is okay because Prigozhin says his troops are returning to the barracks is very naive,” he said.

Meanwhile, Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, speculated that the short-lived coup may have been an attempt to distract and confuse the Russian populace — and ultimately to boost Putin’s image.

“[Putin] could be creating strategy back home, creating this chaos and emerging as the one who has dealt with chaos and using it to say, ‘Look, without me it’d be much worse, crazier people come to power,’” Rohac said. “

There’s no reason to assert this is what’s happening,” he said.

“But it wouldn’t be the first time something happens in Russia that it’s not exactly what it seems to be.”