Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin breaks silence after aborting armed mutiny in Russia (LISTEN)
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on Monday said his march on Moscow revealed "most serious security problems across the entire country," claiming that his units had managed to block "all" Russian military units and airfields in their path.
FollowTwo days after calling off his armed rebellion in Moscow, Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on Monday broke his silence for the first time. In a forceful 11-minute statement, he defended the Wagner mutiny by asserting that "society demanded it." Prigozhin stated in the statement that the rebellion had demonstrated that there were "serious problems with security on the entire territory of our country," while he denied that his Wagner mercenary squad had tried to unseat Vladimir Putin.
“It was not our goal to overthrow the regime,” Prigozhin said in the voice memo, which was uploaded to his Concord Group’s Telegram page.
“We stopped at that moment, when it became clear that much blood would be spilled,” the Wagner boss continued, describing the progress of a military convoy that reached striking distance of Moscow.
“That’s why we believe that the demonstration of what we were planning to do was enough. Our decision to turn back had two factors: we didn’t want to spill Russian blood. Secondly, we marched as a demonstration of our protest," he added.
Once more, Prigozhin charged that the Russian defence ministry had fired artillery at his soldiers, saying that this was the "trigger for us to move out immediately."
“The goal of the march was to not allow the destruction of the Wagner private military company and hold to account the officials who through their unprofessional actions have committed a massive number of errors. Society demanded it," he said.
Prigozhin acknowledged his troops had killed Russian airmen during the uprising, saying they “regretted that they were required to carry out strikes against aircraft but they were hitting our forces with bombs and rocket strikes”.
Additionally, he asserted that the Wagner forces' invasion of Russia was a "masterclass" on how Moscow should have conducted its failed invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, which had the objective of seizing Kyiv.
He also asserts that his forces travelled a distance of 780 kilometres (484 miles) in their march from the south towards Moscow, which is equal to the route taken by Russian forces on February 24, 2014, when they began their invasion of Ukraine, from the Ukrainian border to Kyiv and then on to Uzhgorod, a city in the far west of Ukraine that shares a border with Hungary and Slovakia.
He said if forces like Wagner's troops had carried out that first attack, "the special military operation in Ukraine" would have been over much sooner.
