The head of the Wagner mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, continues his personal challenge to the military leaders in Moscow and in the latest attack he questions the real reasons for the invasion of Ukraine, effectively denying Vladimir Putin’s narrative from the beginning of the war. The head of the Wagner group has released a new video in which he questions Russia’s main justifications for the war in Ukraine, accusing the country’s military leadership of “deceiving” the Russian people and stressing that it would have been possible to negotiate with Volodymyr Zelensky and avoid conflict.
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In 30-minute footage posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin dismissed claims by Moscow that Kiev was planning to launch an offensive on Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine in February 2022. “Nothing out of the ordinary happened on the eve of February 24,” Prigozhin said, adding that “the Defense Ministry is trying to deceive the public and the president by telling the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and they would attack us together at the entire NATO bloc”. Actually, Wagner’s boss said, “Kiev hasn’t bombed Donbass for 8 years, only Russian positions. And the special operation was launched for a completely different reason.” Prigozhin finally added that the Russian leadership could have avoided war by negotiating with the Ukrainian president.
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In the long video interview Prigozhin also talks about the situation on the battlefield. The Russian army is withdrawing in several areas of southern and eastern Ukraine, the “Putin’s cook” said, contradicting Kremlin claims that the Kiev counter-offensive is a failure. “The Russian army is retreating in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson areas, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are pushing,” Prigozhin said, “the same is happening in Bakhmut, the enemy will penetrate our defense deeper and deeper.” Unverifiable by an independent source, Wagner’s boss’s words contradict those of President Vladimir Putin and his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, according to whom the Russian army “repels” all Ukrainian attacks. In recent days, Putin has repeated that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has been a failure and that Kiev’s forces have suffered almost “catastrophic” losses. However, US and Western military intelligence officials have described the result of the early stages of the Ukrainian counter-offensive as “disappointing”.