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Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin went ballistic on the Kremlin in an expletive-laden video on Thursday.
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He lashed out at Russia’s defense minister and a top general, blaming them for a lack of ammo.
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Prigozhin called the pair “animals,” saying they were responsible for the deaths of his men.
Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on Thursday released a video of him screaming and cursing at the Kremlin’s two top officials.
His latest video, published on his press service’s Telegram channel, contains the military contractor’s harshest public comments about Russia’s leaders since the war began.
“Here are the guys from PMC Wagner who died today. The blood is still fresh,” Prigozhin says in the video, seen by Insider.
“Film them all,” he tells a cameraman, who pans over a grassy clearing filled with rows of corpses dressed in combat fatigues.
Prigozhin then launches into an expletive-filled tirade against Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, who Putin tasked with running the war in Ukraine.
He swore at least nine times in the video, though his press service censored the expletives.
“We have a 70% ammo shortage! Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where the [beep] is the ammo?” Prigozhin yells in the video.
He shouted that military leaders who wouldn’t give his troops ammunition would “have their insides eaten in hell.”
“You animals are hanging out in expensive clubs,” an outraged Prigozhin continued. “Your children are enjoying their lives, making videos for YouTube. Do you think that you are the masters of this life and that you have the right to control their lives?”
Prigozhin claimed that the death toll among his troops would have been five times lower had they been supplied with enough ammunition.
“They came here as volunteers,” he said, referring to the dead men in the video. “And are dying for you to be rolling in clover in your mahogany offices. Keep that in mind!”
Normally seen as a close ally of Putin, Prigozhin is now repeatedly complaining that his troops are running out of supplies, and accused Russia’s top brass of cutting him off and dooming his men in Ukraine.
He said his forces only receive a fifth of the shells they need every day, and that the shortage is costing his men their lives.
On Saturday, Prigozhin said his troops in Bakhmut would either have to “withdraw or die” given the massive ammunition deficit. He later added that his organization had lost more than 100 people in a single day during an assault there.
The fighting has been brutal in the eastern Ukrainian region. Wagner’s ground troops, led by Prigozhin, are one of Russia’s main forces deployed there. Both Kyiv and Moscow have lost thousands of men in Bakhmut over the last few months, per Western estimates.
In 2022, the Wagner Group drew scandal for recruiting Russian convicts to fight in Ukraine, promising the prisoners their freedom. Over 40,000 former convicts joined Wagner by July 2022, according to US officials.
Most Wagner soldiers have been ill-equipped and poorly trained, and have died in the fighting, per The New York Times.
The mercenary group stopped recruiting prisoners in February as it realized that convicts were starting to see its offer as a death sentence and refused to sign up, according to local media.
Russia’s defense ministry press service did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment sent outside regular business hours.
Translation by Oleksandr Vynogradov.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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