Russian Paramilitary Leader Vows 25,000 Troop ‘March of Justice’ On Moscow To Confront ‘Evil’ Behind Ukraine War
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the infamous Wagner paramilitary group, vowed a “march of justice” to root out the “evil” behind what he claimed was a Russian missile strike on his troops, sparking talk of civil conflict within Russia.
“This is not a military coup, this is a march of justice,” Prigozhin said in videos released on Friday. “Our actions do not impede the troops.”
“The evil that the military leadership of the country brings forward must be stopped. They have forgotten the word ‘justice,’ and we will return it,” he raged, but never directly mentioned Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Anyone attempting resistance will be considered a threat and immediately destroyed. This includes all the checkpoints on our path and any aircraft above our heads,” he added, noting that his battle-hardened troops possess anti-aircraft missiles along with tanks and other heavy equipment.
Prigozhin, whose mercenary troops have secured key victories for Russia in Ukraine and other battlefields across the globe like Syria, accused the Russian Ministry of Defense of murdering some 2,000 of his troops. The Wagner Group has made headlines throughout the war for its brutal tactics and targeting of civilians, as well as horrendous battlefield executions of its own members accused of desertion or defecting.
Reuters reported that Prigozhin’s rant was accompanied by a separate “unverified video posted on a Telegram channel close to Wagner [which] showed a scene in a forest where small fires were burning and trees appeared to have been broken by force. There appeared to be one body, but no more direct evidence of any attack.”
“The minister of defense has ordered 2,000 bodies that are being stored to be hidden so as not to show the losses,” Prigozhin said, adding:
Those who destroyed our lads, who destroyed the lives of many tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, will be punished. I ask that no one offer resistance…
There are 25,000 of us and we are going to figure out why chaos is happening in the country.
Prigozhin also rebutted some of the often repeated justifications for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, noting that neither NATO nor Ukraine posed a military threat to Russia. In a video earlier in the day, he accused the Russian Ministry of Defense of lying to the Russian people with a “story about the crazy aggression from the Ukrainian side and the plans to attack us with the entire NATO bloc.”
Russia’s FSB security services announced on Friday that had opened a case against Prigozhin and urged his troops to arrest him. Reuters also reported, “The deputy commander of Russia’s Ukraine campaign, General Sergei Surovikin, on Friday urged the fighters of the Wagner private militia to give up their opposition to the military leadership and return to their bases.”
“I urge you to stop. The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country,” Surovikin said in a video released to Telegram.
Watch the clip above CNN.
