Prigozhin lashes out at Russian military leadership, says invasion of Ukraine should not have happened
The press service of the founder of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, published a part of his monologue on Telegram. The head of the mercenaries again sharply criticized the Russian military leadership and made several statements, that do not coincide with the official Russian position regarding the causes and course of the war in Ukraine.
Prigozhin said that Ukraine was not going to attack Russia: "Now the [Russian] Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public, trying to deceive the president and tell the story that there was insane aggression from Ukraine, and they were going to attack us together with the entire NATO bloc. Therefore, on February 24, the so-called special operation was launched for completely different reasons."
Prigozhin also said that after Russia's occupation of part of the Donbas in 2014, the Kremlin and the FSB looted it. "The Donbas was a great place where money was split," Prigozhin said. The strikes of the Ukrainian forces have always beeb directed at the positions of the Russian troops.
Moreover, according to Prigozhin, it was initially possible to avoid the war: "As far as I am aware of this story, Zelensky, when he became president, was ready for any agreements. All that had to be done was to get off Olympus, go and negotiate."
However, the Kremlin's desire to appoint ex-MP Viktor Medvedchuk as president of Ukraine outweighed common sense: "He [Medvedchuk] was waiting for Russian troops to come, Zelensky would run away, everyone would lay down their arms, and he would become president of Ukraine. The only task after that was to split tangible assets once they took control of Ukraine."
In addition, according to Prigozhin, this war was needed so that "a bunch of creatures simply triumphed and promoted themselves, showing what a strong army there was and also so that Shoygu would become a marshal."
As a result, the invasion of Ukraine turned into a "monstrous shame show" for Russia, since Russian president Vladimir Putin self-isolated from the first day and began to receive information about the course of hostilities from the Ministry of Defense, which misleads him, Prigozhin said.
"Everyone was counting on a miracle, on tactical nuclear weapons, on a vigorous bomb that was about to be dropped on Warsaw. But they don’t have balls. The grandfathers are rather weak, they cannot get out of their comfort zone," said the head of Wagner.
Prigozhin admitted that the slogans about the protection of the "Russian people" in the Donbas in fact boiled down to a banal robbery of Ukraine. "Our holy war with those who offend the Russian people, with those who are trying to humiliate them, has turned into just racketeering, or rather, into looting, raised to the rank of law, to the rank of national ideology," he said.
During his monologue, Prigozhin repeatedly called the country's military leadership "foul scum", "mentally ill scum" who "threw thousands of Russian guys into a meat grinder."