Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin breaks silence, appears to taunt Putin over coup attempt: ‘We showed a master class’
Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared to taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday over the mercenaries’ seamless march toward Moscow — while claiming his men were betrayed by the Kremlin because he wanted to stop fighting in Ukraine.
Prigozhin broke his silence to try to justify the attempted weekend coup as he bragged about how easily his forces were able to make it within 120 miles of Moscow, saying Russia’s army could have taken lessons from them during the start of its Ukraine invasion.
“We showed a master class [in] how it should have looked like on February 24, 2022,” Prigozhin said in the 11-minute audio recording, noting that he covered the same distance in 24 hours that Russia sought in Ukraine.
“Therefore, if the actions of the 24 of February… were carried out by units according to the level of training in terms of the level of moral composure and readiness to perform tasks like the Wagner Group, then perhaps the special operation would last a day,” he said.
Prigozhin, who experts have called a “dead man walking” for the uprising, claimed that his short-lived weekend march was a necessary protest after he faced retaliation for wanting to pull out of the war by June 30.
Shortly into the march, Prigozhin alleged that Wagner came under fire from missile strikes and helicopter attacks, which claimed the lives of 30 of his men.
The Wagner chief also boasted that his troops were happily welcomed by the Russian people, as residents were seen Saturday cheering for Wagner and taking photos with them.
“Some are disappointed that we stopped because in the march of justice, in addition to our struggle for existence, they saw support for the fight against bureaucracy and other ailments that exist in our country today,” Prigozhin said.
He ultimately described his march as one of fighting injustice, saying: “We went to demonstrate our protest and not to overthrow power in the country.”
But Putin fired back in a televised address Monday that didn’t mention Prigozhin by name — but clearly had him in its crosshairs.
“The organizers of this rebellion must understand that they will be brought to justice,” Putin said — two days after the Kremlin claimed it would allow Prigozhin to dodge criminal charges and flee to Belarus in exchange for stopping his mutiny.”Everybody understands that this is criminal activity,” the Russian dictator said, calling the attempted coup “a colossal threat.”
It isn’t clear where Prigozhin is. Experts called him a “dead man walking” even before Putin’s blistering speech.
In the Wagner commander’s comments earlier in the day, he reiterated the claim he made Saturday that he halted the insurrection to avoid bloodshed on Russian soil, despite reports that the rogue group killed up to 39 Russian pilots and crew members when it struck down six helicopters and a plane during the chaos.
“Overnight, we have walked 780 kilometers [about 484 miles], Prigozhin claimed of the group’s march toward the country’s capital. “Two hundred-something kilometers [about 125 miles] were left to Moscow. Not a single soldier on the ground was killed.
“We regret that we were forced [into] strikes on aircraft,” he said. “But these aircraft dropped bombs and launched missile strikes.”
As the mercenaries encroached further and further into Russia, a Wagner reconnaissance mission eventually concluded that a direct fight would result if they kept going, so he opted to end the “demonstration,” Prigozhin claimed.
“We felt that demonstrating what we were going to do was sufficient,” he said.
It was then that Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko “extended his hand and offered to find solutions for the further work of Wagner PMC in legal jurisdiction,” Prigozhin claimed.
The rebellion came as a boiling point in a feud between the Wagner chief and the Kremlin’s top military brass, with Prigozhin calling on Moscow to toss out Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu as part of his negotiations to stop the rebellion.
There is no sign that Moscow complied with Prigozhin’s demand, with Shoigu making his first public appearance since the uprising during a visit to Russian troops in Ukraine on Monday.
Putin offered an olive branch in his speech Monday to the Wagner commander’s underlings, insisting that he would uphold the offer he made to them Saturday, along with Prigozhin, to not pursue charges against them if they backed down.
It wasn’t clear how many of them might take Putin up on the offer, given he already apparently ripped it away from Prigozhin when he vowed to prosecute the insurrection’s “organizers” after the Kremlin promised it wouldn’t.
Prigozhin had initially asserted in his fresh audio that none of his mercenaries have gone to the Russian army.
“No one agreed to sign a contract with the Defense Ministry, since everyone knows very well from the current situation and their experience during the special military operation that this will lead to a complete loss of combat capability,” Prigozhin said.
But he later conceded that some had taken the deal, although he claimed it was only 1% to 2% of his forces.
Andrei Gurulev, a retired Russian general and current lawmaker who has rowed with Prigozhin, has said the Wagner chief and his right-hand-man, Dmitry Utkin, deserve “a bullet in the head.”
“I firmly believe that traitors in wartime must be executed,” Gurulev told The Associated Press.
