Russian safety companies reacted instantly by opening a legal investigation into Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Here is a have a look at the 62-year-old Prigozhin and Wagner’s position within the struggle.
What did Prigozhin say?
Prigozhin posted a sequence of indignant video and audio recordings through which he accused Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering a rocket strike Friday on Wagner’s discipline camps in Ukraine, the place his troops are preventing on behalf of Russia.
Prigozhin mentioned his troops would now punish Shoigu in an armed rise up and urged the military to not supply resistance.
“This is not a military coup, but a march of justice,” Prigozhin declared.
The Defence Ministry denied finishing up the rocket assault.
The National Anti-Terrorism Committee, which is a part of the Federal Security Services, or FSB, mentioned he can be investigated on costs of calling for an armed rise up.
The FSB urged Wagner’s contract troopers to arrest Prigozhin and refuse to observe his “criminal and treacherous orders.”
It known as his statements a “stab in the back to Russian troops” and mentioned they amounted to fomenting an armed battle in Russia.
Riot police and the National Guard have been scrambled to tighten safety at key amenities in Moscow, together with authorities companies and transport infrastructure, Tass reported.
What’s Prigozhin’s background?
Prigozhin was convicted of theft and assault in 1981, and sentenced to 12 years in jail.
Following his launch, he opened a restaurant business in St Petersburg within the Nineteen Nineties.
It was on this capability that he acquired to know now-President Vladimir Putin, then town’s deputy mayor.
Prigozhin used that connection to develop a catering business and received profitable Russian authorities contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”
He later expanded into different areas, together with media and an notorious web “troll factory” that led to his indictment within the US for meddling within the 2016 presidential election.
In January, Prigozhin acknowledged founding, main and financing the shadowy Wagner firm.
Where has Wagner operated?
Wagner was first seen in motion in jap Ukraine quickly after a separatist battle erupted there in April 2014, within the weeks following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
While backing the separatist insurgency within the Donbas, Ukraine’s jap industrial heartland, Russia denied sending its personal weapons and troops there regardless of ample proof on the contrary.
Engaging non-public contractors within the preventing allowed Moscow to take care of a level of deniability.
Prigozhin’s firm was known as Wagner after the nickname of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian navy’s particular forces. It quickly established a fame for brutality and ruthlessness.
Wagner personnel additionally deployed to Syria, the place Russia supported President Bashar Assad’s authorities in a civil struggle.
In Libya, they fought alongside forces of commander Khalifa Hifter. The group has additionally operated within the Central African Republic and Mali.
Prigozhin has reportedly used Wagner’s deployment to Syria and African international locations to safe profitable mining contracts.
US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland mentioned in January the corporate was utilizing its entry to gold and different sources in Africa to fund operations in Ukraine.
Some Russian media alleged that Wagner was concerned within the 2018 killings of three Russian journalists in Central African Republic who had been investigating the group’s actions.
The slayings stay unsolved.
What is Wagner’s fame?
Western international locations and UN specialists have accused Wagner mercenaries of human rights abuses all through Africa, together with in Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.
In 2021, the European Union accused the group of “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,” and of finishing up “destabilizing activities” in Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Video has surfaced purporting to indicate a few of the actions which have contributed to Wagner’s fearsome fame.
A 2017 on-line video confirmed a gaggle of armed individuals, reportedly Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian and beating him to loss of life with a sledgehammer earlier than mutilating and burning his physique.
Russian authorities ignored requests by the media and rights activists to research.
In 2022, one other video confirmed a former Wagner contractor crushed to loss of life with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian aspect and was repatriated.
Despite public outrage and calls for for an investigation, the Kremlin turned a blind eye.
What’s Wagner’s position in Ukraine?
Wagner took an more and more seen position within the struggle as common Russian troops suffered heavy attrition and misplaced territory in humiliating setbacks.
Prigozhin toured Russian prisons to recruit fighters, promising pardons in the event that they survived a half-year tour of front-line obligation with Wagner.
In the interview in May, he mentioned he had recruited 50,000 convicts, about 10,000 of whom the place killed in Bakhmut; an analogous variety of his personal fighters have died there.
He mentioned he had 50,000 males at his disposal “in the best times,” with about 35,000 on the entrance strains always.
He didn’t say whether or not these numbers included convicts.
The US has estimated Wagner had about 50,000 personnel preventing in Ukraine, together with 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts.
A US official says practically half of the 20,000 Russian troopers killed in Ukraine since December have been Wagner’s troops in Bakhmut.
The US assesses that Wagner is spending about $100 million a month within the combat.
In December, Washington accused North Korea of supplying weapons, together with rockets and missiles, to the Russian firm in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Both Wagner and North Korea denied the experiences.
How has Prigozhin criticised Russia’s navy?
If the US accusation is true, Wagner’s attain for North Korean weapons could replicate its long-running dispute with the Russian navy management, which dates to the corporate’s creation.
Prigozhin claimed full credit score in January for capturing the Donetsk area salt-mining city of Soledar in Ukraine and accused the Russian Defence Ministry of attempting to steal Wagner’s glory.
He has repeatedly complained the Russian navy failed to provide Wagner with adequate ammunition to seize Bakhmut and threatened to drag out his males.
Troops presupposed to be Wagner contractors in Ukraine recorded a video through which they showered the chief of the Russian navy’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, with curses and accusations of failing to offer ammunition.
Prigozhin additionally has singled out Shoigu for withering criticism whereas accusing Russian navy leaders of incompetence.
Major flooding from Ukraine dam breach captured by satellites
His frequent complaints are unprecedented for Russia’s tightly managed political system, through which solely Putin may air such criticism.
John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, mentioned final month that Prigozhin’s remarks essential of the struggle “could be a sort of morbid way of him… claiming credit for whatever they’ve been able to achieve in Bakhmut, but also trying to publicly embarrass the Ministry of Defence further that the cost was borne in blood and treasure by Wagner, and not by the Russian military.”
Once a shadowy figure, Prigozhin has increasingly raised his public profile, boasting almost daily about Wagner’s purported victories, sardonically mocking his enemies and complaining about the military brass.
Asked recently about a media comparison of him with Grigory Rasputin, a mystic who gained fatal influence over Russia’s last czar by claiming to have the power to cure his son’s hemophilia, Prigozhin snapped, “I don’t stop blood, but I spill blood of the enemies of our Motherland.”
Source: www.9news.com.au
