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Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, reveals horrendous Russian losses in Ukraine
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, reveals horrendous Russian losses in Ukraine
In order to obtain arms,
the entrepreneur has broken a taboo and published photos of dozens of dead fighters.
By Emmanuel Grynszpan
In an attempt to obtain more arms from the Russian defense ministry, the boss of the mercenary group Wagner,
Yevgeny Prigozhin, published a photograph of a pile of Russian corpses on Wednesday, February 22. "In this picture [in which you can see about 50 bodies of men lined up on the snowy ground], you see one of the places where the corpses are put. These guys died yesterday. Because of the lack of shells. There should be five times fewer dead," the businessman said indignantly to ultranationalist blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.
F
or several days, he had been calling, with varying rhetoric, including insults, on Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to provide shells. In a voice message posted on Telegram on Wednesday, he can be heard using the language and tone of the criminal underworld: "
Half of my guys are dying because some military officials don't want to get off their asses. Those who are preventing us from winning this war are working directly for the enemy, helping the enemy to break Russia's back. Don't you have any conscience?"
Prigozhin, who has sent between 30,000 and 50,000 Russian prisoners to an almost certain death on the Ukrainian front, was indignant.
A criminal who spent nine years behind bars during the Soviet era, he discreetly became rich after Vladimir Putin came to power thanks to huge public contracts. Since the invasion of Ukraine, he appears to have risen to the top of the political elite. Deploying a private army abroad and taking tens of thousands of criminals out of prisons – activities that are totally illegal in Russia – requires political resources that only Putin can provide. Prigozhin's rise, however, has been met with fierce Ukrainian resistance for the past eight months around the town of Bakhmut. He has also made many enemies within the state apparatus.