The head of the Russian Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has crossed all red lines in recent hours, calling on the Russian army to defiance and rebellion, causing confusion in Moscow and in the south of the country near the border with Ukraine.
This prompted the Russian Federal Security Service to confirm that these actions constituted a “strike against the Russian military.”
He also considered Prigozhin’s statements and actions as a call to start an armed conflict in the country.
But the controversial Wagnerian leader has a different opinion, and perhaps a different goal, embodied in two ownerless “names” – Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
What is the history of this bitter dispute between the three?
A spark of anger began in late February (2023) from the center of the city of Bakhmut in southern Ukraine, where Yevhen and his elements fought bloody battles with Ukrainian forces for about 10 months.
There, his fiery statements against Shoigu and Gerasimov began to be heard, whenever he lost elements of his forces in this “meat grinder”, as the Wagner commander Bakhmut repeatedly described in the past.
He also accused Shoigu of betrayal and stabbed him in the back, hiding weapons and supplies from him.
Loss retention
He also repeatedly characterized the chief of staff as a bureaucrat, and sometimes a coward, urging the two commanders to visit the fronts not in words but in deeds.
In addition, he accused them of hiding the truth from the Russians, concealing the extent of material and human losses. He gave them and other army leaders various descriptions that ranged from corruption to incompetence and bureaucracy at best.
According to a classified US intelligence document leaked online last April, the spat escalated to the point where Russian President Vladimir Putin had to personally intervene.
Prigozhin and the Russian defense minister called a meeting to resolve the tension.
However, even if these efforts calmed the heat of disagreement for a while, they did not stop them, and sharp and fiery accusations escalated again until the dispute irreversibly broke out from last night when Eugene announced dates and defiance.
An act that the FSB of Russia regards as high treason!
