The head of the Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigojine swore on Saturday June 24 to go “all the way” to overthrow the Russian military command, which he accuses of having bombed his men. The Russian prosecutor’s office announced an investigation for “armed mutiny”.

“We continue, we will go all the way,” Yevgeny Prigojine said in an audio message on Telegram. “We will destroy anything that gets in our way,” he added. He announced that his forces, so far deployed in Ukraine, “crossed (…) the border of the Russian state” and entered Rostov, in the south of the country, but did not provide evidence of these assertions. Agence France-Presse (AFP) was unable to confirm the veracity of these remarks.

In Moscow, security measures have been “reinforced” around sensitive sites, according to a law enforcement official quoted by TASS. The FSB (security forces) called on Wagner’s fighters to arrest their leader. Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov informed President Vladimir Putin “of the opening of a criminal investigation in connection with the attempt to stage an armed mutiny,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. The head of state is “continuously informed” by the security services, he added.

Earlier, Wagner’s boss claimed that Russian strikes had caused a “very large number of casualties” in the ranks of his group. “They carried out strikes, missile strikes, on our rear camps. A very large number of our fighters have been killed,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an audio message, accusing Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering the attacks.

Moscow immediately denied it. “Posts and videos posted on social media by Yevgeny Prigozhin about alleged ‘strikes by the Russian Ministry of Defense on rear bases of the paramilitary group Wagner’ do not correspond to reality and are a provocation”, replied the Ministry of Defense in a press release.

“Justice is on the march”

“The Wagner Group command committee has decided that those with military responsibility for the country must be stopped,” Yevgeny Prigozhin told his supporters. He called for no “resistance” to his troops, saying Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu would be “stopped” – the two men have been at odds for months. “It is not a military coup, it is justice that is on the march. Our actions do not hinder the troops in any way,” Mr. Prigojine added in another audio message.

“There are 25,000 of us and we are going to find out why there is chaos in the country. (…) Our strategic reserves are the whole army and the whole country”, he added, before calling on “all those who want to join us” to “put an end to the disorder”. “I have just received the information that the Minister of Defense has ordered to hide in the morgue in Rostov 2,000 bodies which were stored there in order not to show the extent of the losses” Russians on the ground of the war in Ukraine , Evgueni Prigojine further argued.

The Russian security services, believing this to be a call for “civil war”, urged the soldiers of the Wagner Group to disobey their boss and arrest him. “We call on the fighters of the paramilitary group Wagner not to make an irreparable mistake, to stop actions by force against the Russian people, not to implement the criminal and treacherous orders of Prigozhin and to take measures for the ‘stop,’ the FSB said, as quoted by Russian news agencies. Yevgeny Prigozhin faces between 12 and 20 years in prison if arrested.

Influential Russian general Sergei Surovikin called on Wagner Group fighters to “stop” and return to their barracks “before it’s too late”, in a video broadcast on Telegram by a journalist from Russian television. Russian state.

Ukrainian army is “watching”

In proof that the Kremlin is taking the threat seriously, riot police and the National Guard have been deployed to bolster security at key facilities in Moscow. “Security measures have been tightened in the capital, the most important sites are under heightened security,” as well as “state organs and transport infrastructure,” an unnamed security force official told Tass. order. The agency did not detail these measures, and the official television channel Pervi Kanal, in a special information bulletin, did not report on them.

Images circulating on social networks, online media and whose authenticity AFP cannot confirm show military vehicles circulating in Moscow, near the Ministry of Defense, and in position in front of the lower house of Parliament, the Douma, a few dozen meters from the Kremlin.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, overnight from Friday to Saturday, accused Ukraine of “taking advantage of Prigozhin’s provocation to destabilize the situation” and “gathering units of the 35th and 36th Marine Infantry Brigades to offensive actions”, in the area of ??Bakhmout, ensuring to hit the Ukrainian forces with aviation and artillery.

For its part, the army of kyiv remains laconic. “We are watching,” tweeted Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, while Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov believed that rival Russian factions had begun to “devour each other for power and money.”