Russian intelligence authorities have accused Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin of calling for “armed mutiny” against the state after the warlord vowed to take revenge on Russian defense officials for an alleged attack on his men.
“The statements that are being spread on behalf of Yevgeny Prigozhin are absolutely unfounded,” Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said Friday, per state-run Tass. “In connection with these statements, the Federal Security Service of Russia has started an investigation into a call for an armed mutiny. We demand that unlawful actions be stopped immediately.”
US BLIND SPOT COULD LEAD TO CHINA’S VICTORY IN TAIWAN WAR
Prigozhin has vowed to take revenge for alleged “missile strikes at our rear camps” by regular Russian forces, in a seeming eruption of his long-running dispute with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The warlord made a point of stipulating that “presidential authority” and Russia’s internal security services “will continue operating as before,” but the outburst drew an ominous statement from the Kremlin.
“President Putin has been briefed on all events around Prigozhin,” Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said, according to an unofficial translation from Tass. “The necessary measures are being taken.”
The internal crisis erupted hours after Prigozhin released an extensive audio statement declaring that Russia started the war in Ukraine under false pretexts on behalf of greedy oligarchs eager to “plunder” Ukraine — first the Donbas region, where the war began in 2014, and more recently the whole country.
“Donbas was a perfect place to steal money by both the president’s administration employees — first Surkov, then Kozak,” he said, referring by turns to Putin’s former and current lead advisers for Ukraine, as well as the security agency Putin led before his leap into the Kremlin. “FSB also had a full hierarchy of generals.”
The same venality motivated the expansion of the war last year, he claimed. “The goal was to obtain the material assets to be divided after taking them under control,” Prigozhin said. “They were stealing loads in Donbas, but they wanted more.”
That statement marked a watershed in Prigozhin’s long-running feud with Russian defense authorities, as his denunciation of the FSB is in tension with the widespread perception that the man once known as “Putin’s chef” is backed by Russia’s intelligence services.
“If it’s not the FSB who backs him in his quarrel [with the defense ministry], then who else then? And that is a big question because surely he has sources of support within the power structures,” Johns Hopkins University’s Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian and expert in Chinese and Russian foreign policies, told the Washington Examiner earlier Friday. “Somebody is struggling under the carpet, but unless somebody emerges as a winner from under the carpet, you cannot really tell with a degree of certainty what’s going on.”
That question was thrown into sharper relief as Prigozhin issued another statement in which he accused Russian defense officials of attacking Wagner Group camps.
“PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: The evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin said in an audio message released on Friday, per the War Translated project. “We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the front line. Justice in the army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Prigozhin’s feud with Russian defense authorities has a long fuse. He accused Shoigu’s team of depriving his forces of ammunition through the winter struggle around Bakhmut and more recently rejected Shoigu’s order that mercenary groups sign contracts subordinating the forces to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Yet the eruption of the dispute into a summer showdown still stunned Western observers. “It seems to develop too quickly to get or have insights,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner.
