Putin Decries “Path of Treachery” as Wagner Group Mercenary Forces Move Toward Moscow

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, a private mercenary force, is leading his battled-hardened fighters toward Moscow while Russian President Vladimir Putin accuses his one-time ally, who has played a major role in the Ukraine invasion, of an “armed uprising.”

As the fast-moving events continue to unfold, Reuters reports that the Russian military had fired on Wagner vehicles from the air on Saturday but was “seemingly incapable of slowing their lightning advance” toward the Russian capital. 

The New York Times verified a video posted on social media showing military vehicles “believed to be loyal to Wagner” barreling down a highway in the Lipetsk province, about 250 miles south of Moscow. The governor of the province confirmed late Saturday morning that Wagner had entered the region.

The Wagner Group’s apparent mutiny represents a major domestic crisis and is arguably the most serious threat to Putin’s rule in his near-quarter century in power.

On Saturday morning, Prigozhin claimed that Wagner paramilitary forces had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, a Russian city of about a million people 680 miles south of Moscow, near Ukraine’s border. He announced that his group had taken control of the Russian Armed Forces headquarters in the city, an important command and logistical hub for the Russian war effort.

“We are all ready to die,” Prigozhin said in an audio message on Saturday claiming Wagner’s force stood at 25,000 troops with another 25,000 ready to join, according to Bloomberg.

The rebellion came after Prigozhin accused the Russian military on Friday of killing “an enormous amount” of his soldiers in an airstrike, an allegation the Russian Defence Ministry denies. Prigozhin posted a video from a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel that claimed to show the wreckage of a missile strike on a Wagner camp and pinned responsibility on the Defence Ministry. On Friday, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based, nonpartisan think tank, reported that the video “may have been manufactured for informational purposes.” It has not been independently verified.

Prigozhin also accused Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering the hiding of the bodies of 2,000 Wagner soldiers in a southern Russian morgue.

Over the last several months, Prigozhin has escalated his criticisms of the top Russian military brass, accusing them of keeping ammunition and other equipment from his group as well as hiding the scale of overall Russian military losses, but has avoided directly criticizing Putin.

That all changed on Friday evening, when Prighozin directly rebuked Putin’s core justifications for the Ukraine invasion. ​​“The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” Prigozhin said in a video clip.

In an emergency address on Saturday, Putin vowed “decisive actions” to crush the rebellion. “Any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state … and our actions to defend the fatherland from such a threat will be brutal,” he said. Putin said the armed mutiny amounted to treason.

Responding on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, Prighozin called Putin’s comments “deeply mistaken.” “We are patriots of our Motherland, we fought and are fighting,” he said. On Friday, Prigozhin said his actions were “not a military coup” but “a march for justice.”

A senior U.S. military official told NBC News that Prigozhin’s actions do not amount to a coup attempt, but rather are intended to force the removal of Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, whom Prigozhin has long criticized. The ISW, which echoed the official’s assessment of Prigozhin’s intentions, said that the armed rebellion “is unlikely to succeed.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to the turmoil in Russia on social media. “Russia’s weakness is obvious. Full-scale weakness,” he tweeted. “And the longer Russia keeps its troops and mercenaries on our land, the more chaos, pain, and problems it will have for itself later.”

President Joe Biden said he’d discussed the unfolding situation with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.