As Russia vowed to reply “extremely harshly” to a uncommon, two-day border incursion by pro-Ukrainian fighters, the chief of Russia’s largest mercenary power warned that it confronted additional setbacks except its ruling elite took drastic, and sure unpopular, measures to win the warfare.
“The most likely scenario for us in a special operation would not be a good one,” Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founding father of the Wagner mercenary group, stated in a profanity-laced interview with a pro-Kremlin political observer printed late Tuesday on the Telegram messaging platform. “We are in such a condition that we could lose Russia,” he continued, his speech laced with profanity. “We have to prepare for a very hard war that will result in hundreds of thousands of casualties.”
An oligarch carefully allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Prigozhin has been ramping up stress on Russia’s navy management with bombastic diatribes on public web platforms, and increasing his criticism to the nation’s moneyed elites.
He has been additional empowered by his infamous mercenary power’s position in the latest conquest of Bakhmut, Russia’s first battlefield victory in months. However, Russian state media has stored his identify out of its protection of these occasions, displaying how Russia’s propaganda machine has been hiding elite infighting and issues on the entrance line from the Russian folks.
In the interview, Mr. Prigozhin referred to as for whole warfare — one thing Mr. Putin has rigorously averted, in search of to reassure his those that their lives is not going to be disrupted by the “special military operation” in Ukraine. That place has grown more durable to keep up as the warfare drags on and Russian losses mount.
The Kremlin, Mr. Prigozhin stated, should declare a brand new wave of mobilization to name up extra fighters and declare martial regulation and power “everyone possible” into the nation’s ammunition manufacturing efforts.
“We must stop building new roads and infrastructure facilities and work only for the war, to live for a few years in the image of North Korea,” he stated. “If we win, we can build anything. We stabilize the front and then move on to some kind of active action.”
The different, he stated, is extra violence, however inside Russia, perpetrated by bizarre folks fed up with elites, whom Mr. Prigozhin characterised as ignoring the actuality of warfare however not doing sufficient to win it.
“The children of the elite smear themselves with creams, showing it on the internet, ordinary people’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces,” he stated, referencing the coffins of useless troopers, and including that these killed in motion had “tens of thousands” of kin. “Society always demands justice, and if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”
Mr. Prigozhin stated his Wagner power alone had misplaced 20,000 males throughout the warfare in Ukraine, half of whom had been recruited from prisons. Those convict fighters characterize 20 % of the whole variety of imprisoned convicts who joined the combating power.
A State Department spokesman, Mark Miller, stated that the United States thought-about Mr. Prigozhin’s quantity a big undercount of his losses. Even so, it’s considerably larger than the Russian Armed Forces’ losses that the Kremlin has acknowledged. While American estimates vary considerably larger, the Russian authorities has admitted solely the deaths of 6,000 troopers — statistics final publicly shared in September.
Mr. Prigozhin’s feedback in the interview got here after an incursion into Russia’s Belgorod area by Ukraine-aligned militants. The fighters, ethnic Russians who search Ukraine’s victory, apparently used U.S.-made armored vehicles, and instigated the fiercest combating on Russian soil since the warfare began 15 months in the past.
Mr. Prigozhin stated Ukraine had “one of the strongest armies in the world” and added that the violence at the border mirrored poor management at the highest stage of Russian navy. He has usually singled out Defense Minister Sergei Okay. Shoigu as the object of his ire, and in the interview, Mr. Prigozhin outlined his private credo as, “I love my motherland, I serve Putin, Shoigu should be judged and we will fight on.”
In temporary remarks throughout a gathering with colleagues on Wednesday, Mr. Shoigu provided no response to Mr. Prigozhin’s feedback and maintained that Russia would “respond promptly and extremely harshly” to any additional incursions by “Ukrainian militants.”
Many analysts and different observers marvel at Mr. Prigozhin’s common diatribes in opposition to Russia’s elite in a society that’s strictly managed, and particularly his focused criticisms of Mr. Shoigu.
“He is playing a very dangerous game,” one rich Moscow-based businessman stated of Mr. Prigozhin in an interview with The New York Times in late March, asking for anonymity to debate a outstanding Kremlin-connected particular person. “If he doesn’t stop, he will wind up like Aleksei Navalny.” Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most outstanding opposition politician, is now ill in a penal colony.
But Wagner’s latest victory in Bakhmut after a grueling monthslong battle has given Mr. Prigozhin political carte blanche, stated Dmitri Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist and Kremlin critic.
“You are given everything, permission to break the law, to take people from prisons without asking anyone’s permission, to kill those people if you don’t like them for discipline,” Mr. Oreshkin stated about the phrases of the deal between Mr. Putin and Mr. Prigozhin. “If he had not brought this victory, he would have been torn apart” by the elites he has been disparaging.
“For him it was a matter of life and death.”
Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.
