Friday, June 23, 2023

Wagner head feud with Putin's military heating up

Russia’s FSB security service has opened a criminal case for armed mutiny against Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin after the mercenary chief accused the Russian military of targeting his forces and vowed to “destroy” his rivals. In an extraordinary series of audio clips released late on Friday, Prigozhin claimed that a rocket attack in the Russian region of Rostov had killed scores of his fighters, vowing to take “revenge” and “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of the country”.

The FSB said Prigozhin’s statements and actions were “in fact a call to start an armed civil conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation and a stab in the back to Russian servicemen fighting pro-fascist Ukrainian forces.” It urged Wagner fighters “not to make irreparable mistakes, to stop any forceful actions against the Russian people, not to carry out the criminal and treacherous orders of Prigozhin, and to take measures to detain him”.

Early on Saturday, Prigozhin released another voice message in which he claimed without offering any evidence that his forces had left Ukraine and were entering the southern Russian city of Rostov. “Right now we have crossed all the border points … The border guards greeted us and hugged our fighters. Now we are entering Rostov,” he said. “If anyone gets in our way, we will destroy everything … We extend our hand to everyone. We move forward, we are going all the way!”

  Guardian
All the way where? Moscow?
Russian president Vladimir Putin was getting round the clock updates from all relevant state security agencies on the measures being taken to thwart an attempted armed mutiny.

[...]

General Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s Ukraine campaign, released a video address ordering the mercenaries to remain loyal to Putin. “I urge you to stop,” said Surovikin, who was previously understood to be close to Prigozhin. “The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country.”
Seems like that wait is over.

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