2023-06-24 00:49:05
The owner of the military contractor Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhinstepped up his direct challenge to the Kremlin on Friday, calling for a armed rebellion aimed at overthrowing the Russian defense minister. The security services immediately reacted by opening a criminal investigation against Prigozhin.
Prigozhin published a series of videos and audio recordings in which he accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of order a rocket attack on the Wagner camps in Ukraine, where his soldiers fight for the Russian side.
Prigozhin stated that his troops would now be mobilized to punish Shoigu in an armed rebellion and urged the army not to offer resistance.
“This is not a military coup, but a march for justice,” Prigozhin declared.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied that it carried out such a rocket attack.
The National Anti-Terrorism Committee, which is part of the Federal Security Service (FSB for its acronym in Russian), said he had opened a criminal investigation on charges of calling for an armed rebellion. For its part, the state news agency Tass noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been informed of what had happened.
The FSB asked the soldiers of the Wagner Group to arrest Prigozhin and to refuse to follow their “orders”. criminal and treacherous. He called his statements a “stab in the back to Russian troops” and said they amounted to fomenting armed conflict in Russia.
Prigozhin has often been with his troops near the front line in Ukraine.but his whereabouts were unknown on Friday.
In a sign of the seriousness with which the Kremlin took the threatMembers of the riot police and the National Guard were deployed to beef up security at key Moscow facilities, including government agencies and transport infrastructure, according to Tass.
Yevgeny Prigozhinleader of the Wagner paramilitary group.
He Russia’s Prosecutor General said the criminal investigation was justified and that a charge of armed rebellion carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
Las Wagner Group troops have played a crucial role in the war in Ukraine, managing to capture Bájmut, the city where the bloodiest and longest battles were fought. PRigozhin has repeatedly criticized the Russian military leadership, accusing it of being incompetent. and to deprive his troops of weapons and ammunition, but his accusations and calls for an armed rebellion on Friday were a more direct challenge.
The Russian Defense Ministry required all military contractors to sign contracts with the agency by July 1, but Prigozhinwhose enmity with the Ministry of Defense goes back years, he refused to comply.
In a statement issued on Friday night, Prigozhin said that he was ready to reach an agreement with the Defense Ministry, but “we have been treacherously deceived.”
Prigozhin: “They carried out a rocket attack on our camps”
“Today they carried out a rocket attack against our camps in the rearand they have killed a large number of our comrades,” he said.
Prigozhin claimed that Shoigu personally went to the Russian military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don to lead the attack on Wagner’s troops and then “cowardly” fled.
“This scum will be stopped,” he said, referring to Shoigu.
“We must put an end to the evil embodied by the country’s military leadership,” he shouted, urging the army to offer no resistance to Wagner in his quest to “restore justice.”
Meanwhile, in other developments in the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on other countries to heed warnings that Russia may be planning to attack an occupied nuclear power plant to cause a radioactive disaster.
Members of his government informed international representatives of the possible threat to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, whose six reactors have been shut down for months. Zelenskyy said he expected other nations to “give appropriate signals and put pressure” on Moscow.
«Our principle is simple: The world must know what the invader is preparing. Everyone in the know must act,” Zelenskyy said Thursday night. “The world has enough power to prevent any radiation incident, let alone a radiation catastrophe.”
The Kremlin spokesman has denied that the threat against the plant comes from Russian forces.
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