If there were ever a time for the Kremlin to worry about an uprising by its most out-of-control private army, now would appear to be it.
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has gone from accusing the Russian military of treason to flooding the internet with gruesome photos of the country’s war dead.
“Who is to blame for them dying? Those who should have resolved the issue of supplying us with sufficient quantities of ammunition are to blame,” Prigozhin said Wednesday in comments to a pro-war Telegram channel, singling out Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. A day earlier, he accused both of trying to “destroy” the Wagner Group by deliberately choking off their ammunition supply.
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To drive his point home on Wednesday, he released a photo showing rows upon rows of bloodied and maimed corpses that he said were Wagner fighters killed trying to keep the Kremlin’s grip on Ukraine.
“No steps have been taken to issue ammunition. I am posting a photo below, this is one of the gathering points for the dead. These are guys who died yesterday due to ammunition hunger. There should have been five times less of them,” Prigozhin said.
“Wagner, like a beggar crowd funding, is asking unit commanders to help in some way. We will not leave Bakhmut. We’ll just die twice as much as we already have, until everyone’s gone. And when the Wagernites run out, then most likely Shoigu and Gerasimov will have to take up machine guns,” he said.
While Prigozhin has never been shy about blasting Russia’s top military brass, his outrage is rapidly spreading throughout the ranks of the pro-war military bloggers the Kremlin has relied on to bolster public support for the war.
And it’s threatening to overshadow the “everything is going according to plan and we’re all united” message Putin wants to send ahead of the one-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion, when the Kremlin has only slight territorial gains and a whole generation of young dead men to show for the military conquest.
Even as Putin took to the stage at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium for his pro-war rally Wednesday, Wagner supporters (or bots) flooded the chat of an online livestream of the event with angry messages demanding the military “give ammunition to Wagner!”
Prigozhin–who was known for his role commanding armies of Russian trolls long before he admitted to being the puppetmaster of the mercenary group–was suspected of unleashing the messages. Several pro-Kremlin Telegram channels have also begun conducting polls on who followers would want to see win in the “terrible confrontation”–Shoigu and Gerasimov, or Prigozhin.
Ninety six percent of the more than 15,000 people who responded to one poll on Tuesday voted for Prigozhin.
But anger at the Russian military command has already spread far beyond Prigozhin, and even Wagner.
Igor Bezler, one of the Kremlin’s most well-known proxy commanders from Russia’s first wave of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, called for Shoigu and Gerasimov to be assassinated in an intercepted call with an FSB officer recently, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
“First Shoigu needs to be shot, and then Gerasimov, fuck. And then half of your fucking FSB to be hanged and their asses put on stakes, and then we’ll start to fight,” a man identified as Bezler said in audio of the purported call.
“As long as all these fuckwits are in power … it’s all complete nonsense,” he said, railing against “dumb” Putin and others in power before yelling, “Our leaders are fucking morons!”
Bezler wasn’t the only one to float the idea of putting a “bullet in the head” of the country’s top military brass.
The Wagner-connected Telegram channel Grey Zone on Wednesday shared a missive, apparently referring to unnamed military officials, saying that if they lacked the “honor” to kill themselves for their mistakes, the least they could do is take off their uniforms to stop bringing “shame.”
