Russia’s shadow army boss has predicted Ukraine will win the war, saying that so far it’s “not shaping up” in Russia’s favor.
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin made the claims in a lengthy new video interview released by his press service Wednesday.
The war, he said, “was launched for the sake of denazification, and we made Ukraine a nation that is known throughout the whole world. They are like the Greeks or Romans in a period of prosperity. As for the ‘demilitarization,’ if they had 500 tanks at the beginning of the [war], they now have 5,000 of them. If 20,000 fighters skillfully fought then, now there are 400,000. How did we demilitarize it? It turns out that on the contrary, we, who the hell knows how, have militarized Ukraine.”
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“We came aggressively, walked all over the territory of Ukraine in our boots in search of Nazis. While we were searching for Nazis, we knocked out everyone we could. We approached Kyiv… screwed up and withdrew. Then on to Kherson, we screwed up and withdrew,” he said. “And somehow it’s not shaping up for us.”
He went on to suggest the Ukrainian military is second only to his own band of mercenaries from the Wagner Group.
“Of course, out of correctness I should say the Russian army [is the second best], but I think the Ukrainians today are one of the strongest armies. They have a high level of organization, a high level of training, a high level of intelligence, they have various weapons,” he said.
While he said there is an “optimistic” scenario for how the war will end, in which Russia will keep the territories whose annexations it already “hyped up,” he conceded that is “not likely possible.”
The more likely scenario, according to Prigozhin, is Ukraine restoring its territory to the 2014 borders. “They will attack Crimea, they will try to blow up the Crimean bridge, cut off the supply lines. So we need to prepare for a tough war.”
The mercenary boss also reiterated his frustrations with Russia’s top military brass, claiming Wagner could have captured “all of the Donbas” if only it had been allowed to.
“This happened because of scheming, because of the fear that when a structure grows, it can begin to dictate terms and come to Moscow in tanks,” he said.
“We didn’t come up with this special operation. But we saluted and said… if we’ve gone to fuck with the neighbors, we must fuck with them to the end. And it turns out that the men are fighting, while someone else just likes to get their kicks,” he said of the kids of Russia’s elite who’ve been shielded from the war.
“This dichotomy can end with revolution as in 1917, when first the soldiers will rise up, and then their loved ones… There are now tens of thousands of relatives of those killed. There will probably be hundreds of thousands,” he said, predicting an uprising and massacre in which people will hoist up the children of the elite “on a pitchfork.”
“I recommend to Russia’s elite to gather your fucking youths, send them to war, and then when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, then people will say, now everything is fair.”
