#Wagner PMC CEO Yevgeny #Prigozhin was seen leaving out Rostov-on-Don on an car alongside Wagner PMC convoy
Likely into #Belarus as part of the deal
#Eussia #CoupInRussia #Politics #Europe
#prigozhin
Well, that was quick!
"Breaking" @ 8PM/20:00 EDT
Russian rebellion live updates: Kremlin says it will drop criminal case against Wagner leader
Ah, so all is well & any day now Prigoshin will be invited for tea by Vlad. Wonder how/if Wagner's troops and the newly gifted strategic nuclear weapons in Belarus play any role. For that matter, wonder how Vlad's focus on more "winning" his "special operation" holds up.
#Russia #Putin #RussiaCoup #rebellion #Belarus #Prigozhin #Ukraine #Rostov #Lukashenka
#Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov: Vladimir #Putin himself guaranteed that Yevgeny #Prigozhin, the founder of PMC Wagner, will be able to leave Russia for #Belarus in total safety
So Africa can breath for a while without this pig moving there.
Ah, OK... Whatever the details and spin, here's the gist...
EXILED Wagner leader Prigozhin flees Russia for Belarus after ‘agreeing to stand down’ in deal with Kremlin to end rebellion
Commentary/synopsis (above) is from the always-astute Russian-born (now American) novelist, Gary Shteyngart:
#Russia #Putin #RussiaCoup #rebellion #Belarus #Prigozhin #Ukraine #Rostov #Lukashenka
#Wagner PMC CEO Yevgeny #Prigozhin: They (Shoigu and Gerasimov) wanted to disband the Wagner Group. We left on June 23 for the “March of Justice”. During the day we walked less than 200 kilometers to Moscow. During this time, we have not shed a single drop of the blood of our fighters.
Now the moment has come when blood can be shed, therefore, understanding all the responsibility for Russian blood to be shed on one of the sides, we turn our columns and leave in the opposite direction to the field camps according to the plan
Wagner chief says Ukraine never threatened to attack Russia
The head of the Wagner mercenary group has said Ukraine never threatened to attack Russia, as the #Kremlin claimed when attempting to justify its invasion.
The statement by Yevgeny #Prigozhin dramatically raises the stakes in his battle with Russian military chiefs.
In a video message, Prigozhin said: "We exchanged fire: we hit them, they hit us. This was happening all these long eight years, from 2014 to 2022.
"At some points, the number of strikes, the exchange of fire, was increasing, at others - it was decreasing. By February 24 [2022] there was nothing extraordinary.
"Now the Ministry of Defence is trying to deceive the public; trying to deceive the president and is telling the story that there was insane aggression from Ukraine and they [Ukraine] were going to attack us, together with the entire #NATO bloc.
"The special operation that began on February 24 was launched for completely different reasons."
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/23/wagner-chief-says-ukraine-never-threatened-to-attack-russia
#RussiaInvadedUkraine #WagnerGroup #RussiaUkraineWar #RussianWarCrimes #propaganda #InformationWarfare #WarCrimes #CrimesAgainstHumanity #CivilWar #Russia
#war …
#Wagner is certainly not making any friends on its own side, as now the Chechens have been incensed by them. We can expect in the future that any Russian unit which takes up flank or rear positions next to Wagner will continue retaliatory sabotaging actions. But the Russian MOD will probably have no choice but to send Wagner somewhere they can be kept out of trouble. They’re like a chained pitbull you have to point at the enemy and let them go, then run away and hope they cause as much damage as possible and none of it is to you.
Either way, I can personally empathize with both positions simply because, even though #Prigozhin does treat the war as some kind of personal mob fiefdom or mafia turf war, it still doesn’t take away the fact that many of his issues with the MOD could very well be genuine. After all, the Russian MOD is not free from blame; they should be in charge and handling these situations. But particularly when it comes to the newly mobilized and volunteer battalions, there is much to be desired in the way they’ve husbanded and utilized them thus far.
And by the way, under the cover of all this drama, Russia continued to gain territory in several directions. Not only did they restore all positions that were initially taken by Ukraine’s Zaporozhye push, which had initially claimed to have captured one small settlement just south of Velyka Novosilka.
#ISW assessed on September 11 that the loss of Izyum doomed the initial Russian campaign plan to attack Slovyansk from multiple directions and that even the seizure of #Bakhmut would “no longer support any larger effort to accomplish the original objectives of this phase of the campaign since it would not be supported by an advance from Izyum in the north.” ISW also assessed that Russian offensive operations against Bakhmut and around Donetsk City have “lost any real operational significance for Moscow and merely waste some of [Russia’s] extremely limited effective combat power.”
Wagner mercenaries shifted their approach to seizing Bakhmut to a focus on encircling and trapping Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut City by expending a high proportion of their estimated 40,000 prisoner recruits in deadly human wave attacks. At least 22,000 prisoners disappeared from Russian prisons between October and November 2022 alone - likely as a result of Wagner’s prisoner recruitment efforts. A Russian opposition outlet concluded that 55 percent of the total reported Wagner fatalities in October occurred just on October 24 and October 27 – when Ukrainian forces resisted Wagner assaults on the eastern outskirts of the city. The outlet concluded that the number of social media reports commemorating Wagner servicemen increased by more than 2.5 times as they were committed to suicidal drives on Bakhmut’s immediate outskirts.
The Battle of Bakhmut may, in fact, severely degrade the Wagner Group’s best forces, depriving Russia of some of its most effective and most difficult-to-replace shock troops. The Wagner attacks already culminated once, causing the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) to commit some of its elite airborne troops to the fight. It may well culminate again before taking the city, once more forcing the Russian military to choose between abandoning the effort or throwing more high-quality troops into the battle. The opportunity to damage the Wagner Group’s elite elements, along with other elite units if they are committed, in a defensive urban warfare setting where the attrition gradient strongly favors Ukraine is an attractive one.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin apparently fears that his forces are being expended in exactly this way. [...] Prigozhin claimed that if Wagner does not receive needed ammunition and reinforcements and the blockade of Bakhmut breaks, all is essentially lost and that he will stay with Wagner to the end.[9] Prigozhin’s plea to the Russian General Staff and suggestion that he will stay with Wagner until the bitter end suggests that he is working to position himself as the ultimate martyr for the ideological cause that Bakhmut has come to represent in the Russian milblogger information space. More importantly, it shows that he sees his elite forces to be in grave danger.
Wagner’s success in Bakhmut thus far has given Prigozhin a major advantage in the information space, bolstering his reputation and increasing his popularity in a way that will likely have long-term impacts in the Russian domestic sphere. Prigozhin is one of the most extreme of the Russian pro-war nationalists. He is one of the very few with a serious military force loyal to himself. He has even seemed at times a possible threat to Putin or a possible successor. Which may be why Putin is allowing the Russian MoD to hang him out to dry.
#ISW #Russia #Wagner #Prigozhin
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-6-2023
#Russia’s #WagnerGroup founder admits to US #election #interference
source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/7/wagner-group-founder-admits-to-us-election-interference
“We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere – carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” Yevgeny #Prigozhin said on Monday in comments posted by the press service of his Concord catering firm on Russian social #media.
The empire is crumbling, someone is hedging his bets: "Well, now that you mention it, I always wanted to have an appartment there."
Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continued his efforts to increase his status among Russian elites and his presence in St. Petersburg by attacking local officials and announcing the creation of a PMC Wagner Center in St. Petersburg on October 31. Prigozhin reportedly requested on October 31 that the Russian Prosecutor General’s office open a criminal investigation into the “fact” that St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov organized a “criminal community” in St. Petersburg. Prigozhin alleged that Beglov’s criminal network intends to plunder the state budget and enrich corrupt officials. Prigozhin is likely using his criticism of Beglov and other St. Petersburg politicians to enhance his own reputation—and his campaign may be working. The publication Petersburg Vestnik characterized Prigozhin’s popularity as “skyrocketing” on October 31 and asked if he had any plans to form a party or go into politics, to which Prigozhin replied “I do not strive for popularity. My task is to fulfill my duty to the Motherland, and today I do not plan to create any parties, let alone go into politics.”
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-31
The Russian Defense Ministry has begun to recruit new soldiers from among the inmates of Russia’s so-called “red” penal colonies. This is a class of penal institutions where some of the inmates are former law-enforcement and state-security servicemen. In “red” colonies, convicts are permitted to organize a good deal of their daily life, unlike the other “castes” of inmates in the Russian penal system. According to the #media project Vazhnye Istorii (iStories), no later than the end of September, the Ministry of Defense began to recruit soldiers for a new formation called Storm among the people currently imprisoned in the “red” colonies. #Military recruitment among convicts used to be something only done by Evgeny #Prigozhin, the notorious founder of the #WagnerGroup — Prigozhin’s “private military company” that fought in #Syria in 2015, and is now taking part in #Russia’s #war against #Ukraine. But now the Defense Ministry, led by Sergey #Shoigu, is taking Prigozhin’s lead — by trying to find new conscripts among the #prison|ers.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/10/11/the-wagner-group-s-best-practices-go-mainstream #ossetia #luhansk
Russia’s war against #Ukraine initially obscured tensions within the Russian #elite but then exacerbated them. Both the Rector of the Russian Presidential Academy of National #Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), Vladimir Mau, and three influential police generals from #StPetersburg have recently come under criminal investigation. An influential businessman from Vladimir #Putin’s entourage, Yevgeny #Prigozhin, harshly criticised St Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, although such a situation had been impossible earlier due to unspoken rules within the power vertical. Prior to that, the Secretary of the General Council of United Russia, Andrey Turchak, and the Chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, had argued in public. Conflicts among high-profile politicians and the siloviki are a sign of the collapse of the old system and its body of laws and rules. The elite are fumbling around in search of the outlines of an emerging new order, and it is already clear that the creation of such an order will be preceded by inter-elite #war|s and #repression|s.
https://ridl.io/playing-by-new-rules/ #russia #fsb #wagner #syria #donbas #society
The private military company (PMC) Wagner has once again made international headlines with the arrival of around 1,000 of its employees on battlefields in #Ukraine. For its supposed owner Evgeny #Prigozhin, this is a return to a familiar environment: his companies began their disinformation activities in Ukraine during the #Maidan #revolution. However, the #PMC is no longer limited to making war or business: it is also involved in a broader strategy of branding #Russia in the eyes of foreign, as well as domestic public opinion. This new activity is not so surprising if we recall that Prigozhin himself specializes in Russia’s image abroad and can therefore offer #Wagner many of his contacts in the worlds of public relations and #showbusiness.
While Russian soft power has been probably irreparably destroyed in the West by the invasion of Ukraine, Wagner's recent film productions, all dated 2019-2021, have not necessarily been rendered outdated by the #war in Ukraine. On the contrary, they continue to speak to European circles that admire #survivalism, mercenaries, and non-Asian martial arts, as well as to the #GlobalSouth. They illustrate how the codes of #popculture have been adopted to enhance and justify the #Putin regime’s political objectives and, in particular, to heroize mercenary activity, the “subliminal” message being that Russian heroes fight for the good of all humanity and will inevitably be victorious.
https://russiapost.net/politics/wagnerverse #lybia #CAR #mozambique #donbass #mali #afghanistan #syrien #media
