The Wagner Group mutiny posed the biggest challenge to the Kremlin in two decades (Pictures: AFP/Reuters)

Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was planning to kidnap Russian military chiefs when security services rumbled the plot and forced him to improvise his mutiny, according to Western officials. 

The Wagner Group boss initially wanted to capture Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, head of the army, during a planned visit in the south, the Wall Street Journal reports.

But he is thought to have changed tack when the FSB – successor to the KGB – was tipped off two days in advance and instead targeted the city of Rostov, where the Ukraine war is being waged.

Western analysts believe that might explain why the unprecedented uprising fizzled out 36 hours later.

However, his seizure of Rostov, a city of one million and home to a key military command point, suggests senior army officers could have been involved in the plot.

They are said to include General Armageddon, Sergei Surovikin, deputy commander of the ‘special military operation’.

He was replaced by Gerasimov earlier this year when his blitz of critical infrastructure targets failed to turn the tide of the conflict in Russia’s favour.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, looks out from a military vehicle on a street in Rostov-on-Don (Picture: AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin had vowed to punish the mutineers (Picture: EPA)

General Sergei Surovikin has been named as a possible co-conspirator (Picture: Reuters)

US intelligence suggests Surovikin could have ‘helped plan’ the rebellion, the biggest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s leadership in the two decades since he came to power.

The Kremlin dismissed the reports as ‘gossip’.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: ‘There will now be a lot of speculation, gossip and so on around these events. I think this is one such example.’

Despite the denial, Surovikin has not been seen in public since Saturday, when he came out and called for the mutiny to be halted.

Security in Moscow was ramped up and residents were warned to stay indoors on Saturday as a convoy of Wagner fighters rumbled towards the capital.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko took the credit for brokering a deal ending the uprising (Picture: EPA)

But a near-standoff at the gates was averted when Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally, struck a last-minute deal with Prigozhin ending the unprecedented uprising.

Lukashenko said he had to persuade Putin not to ‘wipe out’ the mercenary chief, after the Russian president vowed to crush the mutiny, likening it to events in 1917 which ended in civil war.

Under the reported terms of the deal, not all of which are known, Prigozhin was allowed to go into exile in Belarus and pardoned on charges of treason.

Speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, the US intelligence official Mark Warner said Prigozhin was holed up in one of the only hotels in Minsk without windows in a bid to guard against assassination.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly wanted to capture the defence minister and head of the army.