During his mutiny, the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin questioned Kremlin propaganda to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine. His critique follows an earlier pattern of enlightening statements by Russian imperialists about the Putin regime.
Prigozhin’s truths
What has received less attention in the context of the uprising is Prigozhin’s questioning of a central Kremlin justification for Russia’s large-scale attack on Ukraine. Since February 2022, Putin and other Kremlin spokesmen have repeatedly said that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a preventive and defensive warfare. Even some Western observers consider Putin’s claim that NATO threatens Russia legitimate.
On the contrary, Prigozhin announced in a video message on June 23, 2023, shortly before the start of his “March for Justice”: “Nothing extraordinary had happened on February 24, 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry is misleading the public, now pretending that Ukraine behaved insanely aggressive, as if Ukraine and all of NATO wanted to attack. The special operation that began on February 24 has a completely different background”.
Prigozhin then attacked the Russian military leadership. She the latter, she said, had been convinced on a quick victory in Ukraine and subsequent promotions in Moscow: “Why was the war necessary? The war took place simply to allow a bunch of imbeciles to triumph, to show up in public and show what a strong army they are. So that [il ministro della Difesa russo Sergei] Shoigu was given the rank of marshal [militare più alto della Russia]. […] And secondly: the war was needed by the oligarchs, it was needed by that clan that de facto rules Russia today. This oligarchic clan receives everything possible. When the foreign companies of this clan are closed, the state immediately divides the domestic companies and hands them over to this clan. That is why businessmen are imprisoned, banks are closed, so that this clan does not lose the volume of its funds.”
While Prigozhin inflates minor players within the Russian leadership for influential decision-makers in Moscow with these statements, his statement was in principle correct. Putin’s escalation of war against Ukraine in February 2022, he had domestic rather than foreign policy reasons.
In another provocative video message released a month earlier, Prigozhin had already questioned a second key element of Kremlin propaganda. On May 23, 2023, you commented via your Telegram channel on Russia’s alleged “denazification” of Ukraine: “We came noisily and walked all over Ukraine in our boots looking for Nazis. While we were looking for the Nazis, we ruined them all.”
Such statements are not extraordinary in themselves, but they are unusual to hear coming from the lips of a key executor of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The mercenary leader is effectively disavowing Moscow’s official justifications for Russian aggression. Paradoxically, this also touches on the reason for Prigozhin’s Wagner Group deployment – even if admittedly it consists of fighters who wage war for money or to shorten their prison sentences rather than for some greater purpose.
Prigozhin come Zhirinovsky?
As a major Russian imperialist actor, Prigozhin continues an old tradition of post-Soviet nationalist politicians with his attacks on Putin. Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946-2022) e Igor the Greek (n. 1970), for example, years earlier they had already attracted attention with equally embarrassing statements for the Kremlin. Far-right critics of Putin’s regime have repeatedly publicly accused the Kremlin of lying.
A series of terrorist attacks in Russia in 1999, attributed to Chechen terrorists, served as a pretext for the Kremlin to launch the second Chechen war. The new Moscow war in the Caucasus was popular with the frightened Russian population. And the Russian military’s mass-killing campaign in the Chechen Republic provided a major impetus for the meteoric rise of the then newly minted head of government and not yet president, Vladimir Putin.
However, theapartment building explosion in the southern Russian provincial city of Volgodonsk on September 16, 1999, allegedly by Caucasian terrorists, took place under bizarre circumstances. Three days earlier, the attack had already been announced at a meeting of the State Duma in Moscow.
In 2002, Zhirinovsky reported on the events of September 13, 1999 in the Russian parliament: “A note was brought by someone from the secretariat [della Duma di Stato]. Apparently, they had been called to warn the speaker of the Duma about this turn of events [cioè, l’attacco terroristico]. [Il Presidente del Parlamento Gennady] Zelezhnev read us the news about the explosion. Then we waited for the TV news to report the incident in Volgodonsk.”
It took three days for that explosion to happen. It was September 16, 1999.
Like Prigozhin in 2023, Zhirinovsky must have been aware of the explosive nature (for Putin’s regime) of his statement in 2002. His statement called into question the legitimacy, authority and integrity of the new Russian president.
Girkin and the Donbas war
Nine years ago, there was another revelation of Russia’s infamous and once-infamous paramilitary leader “defence minister” of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, Igor Girkin, about the 2014-2015 pseudo-civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Since the beginning of the alleged Donbas rebellion in spring 2014, there was a controversial discussion about the start of the war not only in Russian but also non-Russian media. Even some Western analysts see the main causes of the armed conflict in the Donetsk Basin not in Russian policies, but, as Kremlin propaganda also claims, in Ukrainian politics.
In an interview for the far-right Russian weekly “Zavtra” (Tomorrow) in November 2014, Girkin revealed: “I pulled the trigger for war. If our unit [armata] had not crossed the border [dalla Russia in Ucraina]everything would go as it did in [nord-est dell’Ucraina] Kharkiv e [sud dell’Ucraina] Odessa. Girkin further said: “the impetus for the war, which continues to this day, was given by our unity [armata].
As detailed in the next book by Jacob Hauter“Russia’s Careless Invasion: The Causes of the 2014 Outbreak of War in Ukraine’s DonbasGirkin and company acted as unofficial agents of the Russian government in its, at the time, still inter-state proxy war against Ukraine.
Like Zhirinovsky in 2002 and Prigozhin in 2023, Girkin contradicted a central Kremlin propaganda tenet in November 2014 by publicly assuming responsibility for unleashing the Russo-Ukrainian war seven months earlier. However, non-Russian commentators around the world continue to claim that Russia simply “intervened” in August 2014 in a Ukrainian armed conflict that had already been going on for several months. Girkin, on the other hand, admitted that his irregular force, which he had invaded from Russia and which was under the supervision of Russian state bodies, had triggered the alleged civil war in Ukraine’s Donetsk Basin in April 2014.
Inadequate revelations and debates
The particular explosiveness of the admissions of Zhirinovsky, Girkin and Prigozhin is that none of these men are liberal Muscovites or Western critics of Putin. Rather, the men are known at home and abroad as aggressive Russian imperialists. And in the case of Prigozhin, it must be added that he is Putin’s creature.
Given these and other memorable revelations by prominent Russian ultranationalists, some non-Russian arguments in support of Russia are surprising. In the world‘s media, parliaments, ministries, universities, institutes and political parties, the Kremlin’s apologetics of Russian military expansion continues to find naive takers to this day, despite many self-revealing admissions such as those of such influential figures as Zhirinovsky, a Girkin and a Prigozhin.