The head of Wagner’s Russian mercenaries on Friday accused the Russian Defense Minister of ordering bombardments against his bases and called for his arrest. “A missile attack has been carried out on the Wagner camps. Many victims. According to eyewitnesses, the blow was delivered from behind, that is, it was delivered by soldiers from the Russian Defense Ministry,” Yevgeny Prigozhin cried. Meanwhile, Russia has opened a criminal investigation into Prigozhin for attempted military “riot.”
Hours later, Prigozhin claimed that Wagner’s forces had entered the Russian city of Rostov without encountering resistance. Moscow and the road that connects it with Rostov are taken over by Russian security forces in anticipation of a riot. According to the mercenary chief, his army shot down a Russian helicopter that “fired at a column of civilians” at dawn this Saturday.
“A huge number of combatants died,” said the creator of the most important mercenary company, who warned that in the near future Wagner will decide “how to respond to this atrocity.” “That monstrosity will be stopped,” Prigozhin said of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. “We are bathing in our own blood. Time is running out fast,” he added.
The Ministry of Defense denied the attacks, which are not the first. In addition, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, quoted by the TASS news agency, stated that “President Putin has been informed of all the events surrounding Prigozhin. The necessary measures are being taken.” Among these measures, the Russian Anti-Terrorism Committee reported this Friday the opening of a criminal case for calls for armed rebellion against Prigozhin, and the Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB) is in charge of opening that case.
In fact, shortly before midnight, the FSB has asked the mercenaries of the Wagner group to rebel against their boss: “We call on the fighters of the private Army not to make an irreparable mistake, to cease any armed action against the Russian people, failure to carry out Prigozhin’s criminal and treasonous orders, take measures for his arrest,” the intelligence service said in a commentary quoted by Interfax. In addition, the deputy commander of the Russian campaign in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, on Friday urged fighters from the private Wagner militia to abandon their opposition to the military leadership and return to their bases.
Prigozhin, who has led the Wagner private army since its inception which has been fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine, has been a strong critic of Russian military commanders for months. But this time the verbal escalation surpasses the previous ones by a lot. “We were grossly deceived and they tried to deprive us of the opportunity to defend our homeland. We were ready to make concessions to the Ministry of Defense, to hand over our weapons, to find a solution on how we would continue to defend the country. But this scum did not calm down. Today , seeing that we are not sunk, they launched rocket attacks on our rear camps,” Prigozhin said, calling on the Russian military not to resist Wagner’s forces.
Sitting in a chair with a giant black Wagner flag behind him, the mercenary leader described his country’s invasion of Ukraine as a “fraud” perpetrated by a corrupt elite who chase money and glory with no concern for the lives of others. russians. He again avoided charging directly at Vladimir Putin, instead presenting him as a leader deceived by his officials. Still, it is the first time that Prigozhin has squarely rejected Russia’s main justifications for invading Ukraine last year. Russians have gone to jail for much less during these months.
“War was not needed to bring Russian citizens back into our midst, nor was it necessary to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” Prigozhin said, referring to Putin’s official justifications for invading in 2022. “War was needed for a group of animals could simply rejoice in glory. Prigozhin denounced that “the Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the society and the president and tell us a story about how there was a crazy aggression from Ukraine and that they planned to attack us with all of NATO.” For Prigozhin, the official version, the only one that is legal to spread in Russia, is only “a beautiful story”, because “the war was necessary… so that Shoigu could become a marshal (…) so that he could get a second [Russia’s] ‘Hero’ medal. The war was not necessary to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine.”
“This is not a military coup,” Prigozhin said in a series of audio recordings posted on Telegram. “It is a march for justice. Our actions do not interfere in any way with the troops.” Prigozhin also accused the Russian Defense Minister of ordering 2,000 bodies of Wagner fighters to be hidden in a morgue in southern Russia.
The BBC’s Russian-language service reported overnight that the FSB and other security officials in Moscow were alerted after Prigozhin’s barrage. A channel source in the intelligence services warned that the FSB, with the support of special rapid response units of the National Guard troops, installed barricades on the highway between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don, located next to the border ukrainian. Agents are ordered to open fire “in case of threat.”
Other media outlets added that Moscow’s security forces are on high alert and that the Fortress plan (to protect targets considered key by the Interior Ministry) has been activated in the capital. The entrances and exits of buildings of the Ministry of the Interior are closed.
On Thursday, Prigozhin accused the top brass of lying to Putin and the Russian people about the scale of losses and Russian setbacks in Ukraine. In Friday’s video, he claimed that Moscow could have reached an agreement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the war, that the conflict had been a disaster for Russia and that tens of thousands of young lives had been needlessly sacrificed, including limbs. more capable.
Some Russian analysts have speculated that Prigozhin has political ambitions and may be looking to replace Shoigu. Although Putin has avoided favoring either side of this battle between Russia’s formal and ‘informal’ military, the Russian president has backed a Defense Ministry order (opposed by Prigozhin) stating that mercenary groups like Wagner must sign contracts to place themselves under ministry control by July 1.
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