While Russian President Vladimir Putin insists that his nation is more united than ever before following the Wagner Group’s armed uprising over the weekend, a Russian soldier has apparently been caught rooting for mercenaries to oust Putin from power.
A two-minute audio clip released by Ukrainian intelligence on Tuesday captured the shocking reaction of a man identified as a Russian soldier while a loved one back home panics about an impending “civil war.”
In the audio, purportedly taken from an intercepted phone call, a woman fills the purported soldier in on the notorious Wagner Group rolling into Russia’s Rostov region on tanks as they vow to take revenge against the regular Russian army.
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“Good for them!” the man says, leaving his interlocutor flabbergasted. “Let them make it to the fucking Kremlin and get rid of that jackass Putin.”
“A civil war is going to start right now!” the woman responds.
“Well it’s about time! Everyone’s fucking pissed off,” the purported soldier responds.
“They took over Rostov, there are convoys of their vehicles, … there are tanks right in the city, Rostov, Voronezh, and Prigozhin in his speech says, ‘Basically if [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu doesn’t come for negotiations, I’m going to Moscow.’”
“Yes, and it’s about time!” the man says. “I only support Prigozhin, good for him.”
“You understand that everyone there is afraid of them? Even the police and soldiers are laying down their weapons. They’re not even trying…” the woman says.
“They’re going to take over all [military bases] now and airfields, and Putin is fucked,” the man responds.
“And then what will happen? Is Russia fucked?”
“And what the fuck has Putin done for Russia?” the alleged soldier says.
“Don’t you understand, people in our own country are splitting into two camps right now… it will be a civil war! This is fucked up, people are worried. What is going on, what will happen? Is Shoigu too fucking scared to meet with fucking Prigozhin?”
“Of course he’s fucking scared!” the purported soldier says.
The leaked audio comes as Putin on Tuesday admitted that Wagner was funded by the Russian government, despite ostensibly being a “private” military company. After years of denying that the mercenary group was just a proxy force for the Russian military, Putin admitted that “we fully financed this group” from the government budget and paid about $1 billion to Wagner.
Apparently in an attempt to throw his longtime ally Yevgeny Prigozhin under the bus, Putin complained that “the owner of the Concord catering company” got filthy rich “off the shoulders of the state” during the war against Ukraine.
Bizarrely, he went on to say that he hoped the monster created by the Kremlin at least didn’t swindle the government too badly.
“I hope that, during this work, no one stole anything, or let’s say, stole less.”
