Prigozhin Derides Ukraine Invasion as ‘Racket’ to Enrich Russia’s Elite

[cigaretteman]

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the outspoken Russian mercenary tycoon, described his country’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday as a “racket” perpetrated by a corrupt elite chasing money and glory without concern for Russian lives.
While Mr. Prigozhin, who leads the private Wagner force that has been fighting alongside the Russian military in Ukraine, has been scathing of Russia’s military leadership for months, the 30-minute video monologue he released on Friday took his criticism to a new level.
He did not explicitly impugn President Vladimir V. Putin, instead casting him as a leader being misled by his officials. But in dismissing the Kremlin’s narrative that the invasion was of existential necessity for the Russian nation, Mr. Prigozhin went farther than anyone in Russia’s security establishment in publicly challenging the wisdom of the war.
“The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” Mr. Prigozhin said, referring to Mr. Putin’s initial justifications for the war. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”
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Friday’s diatribe deepened the enigma of Mr. Prigozhin’s ambiguous role in Mr. Putin’s system. His Wagner troops, composed of veteran fighters as well as thousands of convicts whom Mr. Prigozhin personally recruited from Russian prisons, proved key in capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in May after a monthslong battle.

But during the battle for Bakhmut Mr. Prigozhin also emerged as a populist political figure, excoriating Russia’s military leadership for corruption and for not providing his forces with enough ammunition. His angry recordings and videos posted to the Telegram messaging network cast top military and Kremlin officials as unaware and uncaring of the struggles of regular Russian soldiers.
Mr. Putin has not reined in Mr. Prigozhin, even as his security forces have jailed or fined thousands of Russians for criticizing the military or opposing the war. Some people who know Mr. Putin have said they believe that the president still sees Mr. Prigozhin as a loyal servant applying needed pressure on a sprawling military apparatus. Others theorize that the Kremlin has orchestrated Mr. Prigozhin’s tirades against Sergei K. Shoigu, the defense minister, to deflect blame from Mr. Putin himself.
But Friday’s video complicated the picture, with Mr. Prigozhin going after not just Mr. Shoigu but also unnamed “oligarchs” around Mr. Putin, while casting the entire official rhetoric around the invasion as a sham. He said there was “nothing out of the ordinary” in Ukraine’s military posture on the eve of the February 2022 invasion — challenging the Kremlin’s justification that Ukraine was on the verge of attacking Russian-backed separatist territory in the country’s east.
“Our holy war with those who offend the Russian people, with those who are trying to humiliate them, has turned into a racket,” he said.

​

The comments come as Russia fights to hold back Ukraine’s counteroffensive — a fight that Mr. Prigozhin asserted in his video was going much more poorly for Russia than the government was letting on. On Telegram, pro-war commentators quickly pushed back against Mr. Prigozhin, including Igor Girkin, a former paramilitary commander who himself has often criticized Russia’s top brass.
“Prigozhin already should have been handed over to a military tribunal for many things,” Mr. Girkin wrote. “Now also for treason.”

Prigozhin Derides Ukraine Invasion as ‘Racket’ to Enrich Russia’s Elite

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who leads the private Wagner force, has been scathing of Russia’s military leadership for months, but the 30-minute video he released on Friday took his criticism to a new level.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Hawk-A-Doodle-Doo]

Condolences in advance to his widow Lyubov, their two children, and friends and loved ones on his near-future sudden, tragic and totally unexplained death.

 

[cigaretteman]

Russia’s Federal Security Service late Friday announced a criminal case against Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin, accusing him of “incitement to armed rebellion” after he declared an open conflict with Russia’s military leadership and called on Russians to join 25,000 Wagner fighters against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top commanders.


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Prigozhin, whose private military company helped Russia seize the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Moscow’s only significant territorial gain this year, accused the Russian military on Friday of carrying out a strike on a Wagner camp, and appeared to threaten Shoigu, declaring “This scum will be stopped!”
In a rare late-night statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that President Vladimir Putin had been informed about the situation and that “all necessary measures” were being taken.



The announcement of the criminal case by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, signaled that Prigozhin could face imminent arrest for comments in which he declared that he would lead a “march of justice” against his enemies in Russia’s Ministry of Defense. The Wagner leader denied that he was attempting a military coup.
In a series of furious audio messages, Prigozhin accused Shoigu of flying to Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia specifically to launch a missile strike against Wagner, before fleeing the area late Friday.
The Russian Defense Ministry responded swiftly to Prigozhin’s extraordinary threats, denying his claim that the military had struck a Wagner camp, calling it “an informational provocation.”

“The armed forces of the Russian Federation continue to carry out combat missions on the line of contact with the armed forces of Ukraine in the area of the special military operation,” the ministry said.


Prigozhin posted a video purporting to show the strike on the camp where he said many of his fighters were killed. It depicted rising smoke and signs of destruction but no evidence of the large number of casualties that he claimed.
Delivering mail in war-ravaged Ukraine: ‘There are still people living here’
After a meeting that he described as a Wagner war commanders’ council, Prigozhin posted an audio message on Telegram late Friday warning that “those who destroyed our guys today, and tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers, will be punished. I ask no one to resist.”

Any resistance would be deemed a threat and immediately destroyed, including roadblocks and aircraft, he declared.
Prigozhin, who earned a fortune and the nickname “Putin’s chef” through government catering contracts, has been in a running, months-long feud with Shoigu and other regular military commanders. He repeatedly accused them of denying his fighters sufficient ammunition in the long campaign to seize Bakhmut, and earlier Friday he issued a separate statement claiming that the military leadership had tricked Putin into going to war in Ukraine in February 2022 by alleging nonexistent threats.


But his statement late Friday amounted to an extraordinary, hostile challenge to Russian military authorities, and suggested that the feud was on the brink of spilling into open warfare.

“I ask everyone to remain calm, not to succumb to provocations, to stay in their homes. It is advisable not to go outside along the route of our journey,” he said, apparently on his way to confront Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the Russian general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, both of whom he had bitterly criticized in a video earlier Friday.
Minutes later, Prigozhin released more furious audio messages. “This is not a military coup, this is a march of justice,” he said in one. “Our actions do not interfere with the troops in any way.”
“Shoigu has just fled from Rostov,” he yelled in another message, in obvious rage. “At 9 p.m. he ran as cowardly as a woman, so as not to explain why he raised helicopters to destroy our guys, why he launched missile strikes! This scum will be stopped!”



Prigozhin has demonstrated fierce loyalty to Putin, and Wagner forces have been useful to the Kremlin in the war, as they were in promoting Moscow’s interests in other conflict zones, including Syria, Libya and numerous African countries.
As Russian military forces stalled or lost ground in Ukraine, Wagner succeeded recently in taking control of the city of Bakhmut after a bloody battle that took months and cost thousands of Wagner lives — including those of former convicts who Prigozhin personally recruited from prison to join the fight in exchange for pardons.
In another stunning claim Friday night, Prigozhin accused Shoigu of hiding the bodies of 2,000 dead Russian soldiers in a bid to mask Russia’s true casualty numbers in Ukraine.
Russian ban of wildlife fund signals isolation even on animal protection
Despite his loyalty, Prigozhin lately appeared to have been falling out of favor with Putin, who recently sided with Shoigu’s demand that Wagner and other “volunteer” fighting formations sign military contracts putting them firmly under the Defense Ministry’s control. Prigozhin, resisting the demand, came up with his own contract.



The Wagner founder seemed to cross a new red line in his video comments earlier Friday, when he shot down Putin’s central main pretexts for invading Ukraine, declaring that Russia faced no extraordinary threat from Ukraine. He said that Russian military officials had deceived Putin into going to war.
The war, he claimed, was designed by Russian officials and oligarchs who had plundered two separatist regions of Donbas for years, but grew greedy and wanted to plunder all of Ukraine.
“The war was not needed to return our Russian citizens to our bosom and not to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine,” Prigozhin said.
Prigozhin, with a high profile globally and domestically, gained a reputation in Russian nationalist circles for telling harsh truths about the war that the military would rather hide.



But his Friday claim that Putin had been deceived went well beyond his frequent rants against top military officials and Russian oligarchs, because it undermined Putin’s key argument to Russians — and leaders in the Global South — that Russia had “no choice” but to launch a preemptive invasion because Ukraine was committing “genocide” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and was planning a massive attack with NATO’s support on Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/23/prigozhin-wagner-mercenary-russia-military/

 

[Scott559]

Gunshot wound to the back of his head will likely cause him to accidentally fall out of an airplane.

 

[hawkjt]

This seems to be escalating with prigozy seizing a town between Ukraine and Moscow and Putin is clearly pissed.
Hmmmm......

 

[Funky Bunch]

So will he team up with Putin or kill him?

 

[NorthernHawkeye]

So he derides the invasion as enriching the elites but then he helped invade?

 

[jawatkins]

Welp it’s over already