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The Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has said Russia’s defence ministry concocted false pretences to trick Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine and said Moscow could have avoided the war entirely.
In a half-hour tirade Prigozhin, founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, claimed Russia had faced no immediate threat from Ukraine when Putin began his full-scale invasion last year and accused the army’s top brass of deceiving the Russian president for their own personal gain.
The extraordinary rant, posted on social media on Friday, was the former caterer’s latest salvo in a long-running spat with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin has accused of sabotaging the war effort together with Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff.
Prigozhin’s regular diatribes, in which he claims Russia runs the risk of losing the war after Ukraine began a counteroffensive earlier this month, indicate elite infighting is getting fiercer as Moscow’s war effort continues to struggle.
Though Prigozhin notably refrained from criticising Putin personally and has backed the war’s goals, the video was the first time he publicly questioned Russia’s rationale for the full-scale invasion.
“There was nothing out of the ordinary on February 24,” said Prigozhin, referring to the day Putin ordered the invasion. “The defence ministry is trying to deceive the president and society by saying Ukraine was going mad with aggression and was planning to attack us together with the whole Nato bloc.”
Instead, Prigozhin claimed Shoigu had convinced Putin the war was necessary so “a bunch of bastards could rule the roost and show off about what a strong army they have”, then botched the invasion through “incompetent planning”.
“For some reason, this bunch of idiots thought they were so smart-assed that nobody would understand what they were up to or stop them on their way to Kyiv,” he added.
In a country where “discrediting the armed forces” is punishable with up to 15 years in prison, Prigozhin, who has known Putin since their days in St Petersburg in the early 1990s, is widely believed to have the Russian president’s approval for his attacks on the army.
Prigozhin’s rant on the war’s failures notably absolved Putin himself or the FSB security service, which played a much more prominent role in planning the invasion than the army.
Putin admitted earlier this month that he had personally pardoned convicts so they could be released to fight in Ukraine — a recruitment technique pioneered by Prigozhin when he raised a prisoner army to fight in the “meat grinder” of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
After Russia captured the city last month, however, Putin backed Shoigu’s efforts to bring irregular units such as Wagner under the army’s control.
Since then, Wagner’s troops have been absent from the front lines, and Prigozhin has cast doubt on whether they will return at all.
He said Russia’s army continued to lie to Putin about the success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and warned that the army risked leading the country to ruin on the battlefield.
“What they’re telling us is a total fraud. We’ll only face the truth when [ . . . ] this bunch of bastards realise they have already pissed away a huge piece of territory and declare they are regrouping somewhere better,” he said. “The enemy is penetrating our defences all the more deeply.”
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