The Prighozin File: Twilight of the Gods or Maskirovka?
The puny double drone attack – a combined Anglo-Saxon neocon provocation – has offered Moscow the perfect gift: an unmistakable casus belli.
Yevgeny Prighozin, the maestro of private military company Wagner, is never shy of also performing as a master communicator / troller / psyop specialist.
So no wonder when he delivered a recent rhetorical missile – here, in Russian, on War Gonzo – quite a few eyebrows were raised.
In the heat of war, and on the eve of the incessantly mythologized Ukrainian “counter-offensive” – which may or may not happen in myriad suicidal forms – Prighozin went on the record absolutely destroying the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), Minister Shoigu personally, and the Kremlin bureaucracy.
The bombshell revelations caused serial ripples among Russian experts yet not among the English-speaking crowd, which seems not to have grasped the enormity of it all, as Russian insiders who analyzed the whole interview in detail told me. Here is a noteworthy exception, focusing on the key bullet points.
Prighozin does flirt with a few absurdities, offered with no proof. Example: Russia didn’t win both Chechen wars; Putin paid Kadyrov’s father a bribe to wrap it all up. Or the assertion that the Debaltsevo Cauldron in Donbass did not exist; instead Poroshenko’s army simply made an orderly retreat intact.
Yet it’s the serious accusations that stand out. Among them: the SMO proved that the Russian Army is essentially unorganized, untrained, undisciplined and demoralized; there’s no real leadership; and the MoD lies, routinely, about what’s happening in the battlefield as well as about Wagner’s maneuvers.
Prighozin is adamant that it was Wagner that launched an operation to stabilize the front when the Russian army was retreating in chaos following a Ukrainian counterattack.
His main point is that Russia has all it takes to win, fast and decisively; but “the leadership” keeps the resources away from the actors who need it on purpose (presumably, Wagner).
And that ties up with the success in Bakhmut/Artemyovsk: the whole plan was masterminded by Wagner alongside “General Armageddon” Surovikin.
“Kill me, that would be better than lying”
Prigozhin is confident in his knowledge of where all the necessary military supplies are kept, enough to fight for another six months. Wagner needs a least 80,000 shells a day. Why they are not getting it amounts to “political sabotage”.
Because of Russian bureaucracy – from the MoD to the FSB, no one is spared – the Russian army “has been transformed from the world’s second-best army into one of the worst – Russia cannot even deal with Ukraine. Russia’s defenses won’t hold if supplies are not released to the soldiers.”
Prighozin ominously states in the interview that Wagner might have to retreat unless they get their supplies. He foresaw the Ukrainian counter-offensive as inevitable, setting a possible May 9 – Victory Day – a
Article from LewRockwell
