While Russia vowed to respond “extremely harshly” to a rare, two-day border raid by pro-Ukrainian fighters, the leader of Russia’s largest mercenary force warned that unless the ruling elite takes drastic and likely unpopular action, it faces further backlash win.
“The most likely scenario for us on a special operation would not be a good one,” Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, said in a swear-laced interview with a pro-Kremlin political observer, published late Tuesday on the Telegram messaging platform . “We are in such a state that we could lose Russia,” he continued, his speech laden with profanity. “We must prepare for a very tough war that will claim hundreds of thousands of lives.”
An oligarch closely allied with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Prigozhin is increasing pressure on Russia’s military leadership with bombastic diatribes on public internet platforms and extending his criticism to the country’s wealthy elites.
He was bolstered by the role of his notorious mercenary force in the recent capture of Bakhmut, Russia’s first victory on the battlefield in months. However, the Russian state media has kept his name out of coverage of these events, showing how the Russian propaganda machine is hiding elite power struggles and frontline problems from the Russian people.
In the interview, Mr. Prigozhin called for all-out war – something Mr. Putin has carefully avoided to reassure his people that his life will not be disrupted by the “special military operation” in Ukraine. This position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as the war drags on and Russia’s losses mount.
The Kremlin, Mr. Prigozhin said, must launch a new wave of mobilizations to call up more fighters, declare martial law and force “everyone possible” into the country’s munitions production.
“We have to stop building new roads and infrastructure and just work for the war to live like North Korea for a few years,” he said. “If we win, we can build everything. We will stabilize the front and then move to active action.”
The alternative, he said, is more violence, but within Russia, perpetrated by ordinary people who are fed up with the elites and who, according to Mr Prigozhin, are ignoring the reality of the war but not doing enough to win it.
“The children of the elite rub cream on themselves, show it on the Internet, the children of the common people come in zinc, torn to pieces,” he said, referring to the coffins of dead soldiers, adding that those killed in battle “Dozens of… had thousands” of relatives. “Society always demands justice, and when there is no justice, revolutionary feelings arise.”
Mr Prigozhin said his Wagner squad alone lost 20,000 men during the war in Ukraine, half of whom were recruited from prisons. These convict fighters account for 20 percent of the total number of incarcerated convicts who have joined the fighting force.
A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said the United States considered Mr. Prigozhin’s number to be a gross underestimate of his casualties. Nevertheless, they are significantly higher than the losses of the Russian armed forces admitted by the Kremlin. While American estimates are significantly higher, the Russian government has only admitted the deaths of 6,000 soldiers – statistics last publicly released in September.
Mr. Prigozhin’s comments in the interview came after an incursion by militants allied with Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region. The fighters, ethnic Russians seeking Ukraine’s victory, apparently using US-made armored vehicles, sparked the fiercest fighting on Russian soil since the war began 15 months ago.
Mr Prigozhin said Ukraine had “one of the strongest armies in the world”, adding that the violence at the border reflected poor leadership at the highest level of the Russian military. He has often singled out Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu as the object of his anger, and in the interview Mr. Prigozhin defined his personal credo as follows: “I love my fatherland, I serve Putin, Shoigu should be condemned and we will fight.”
In brief remarks during a meeting with colleagues on Wednesday, Mr Shoigu offered no reaction to Mr Prigozhin’s comments, claiming Russia would respond “promptly and extremely harshly” to any further incursions by “Ukrainian militants”.
Many analysts and other observers are puzzled by Mr. Prigozhin’s regular diatribes against Russia’s elite in a tightly controlled society, and specifically his pointed criticism of Mr. Shoigu.
“He’s playing a very dangerous game,” a wealthy Moscow businessman said of Mr Prigozhin in an interview with the New York Times in late March, asking for anonymity to speak about a prominent figure with Kremlin ties. “If he doesn’t stop, he will end up like Aleksey Navalny.” Mr Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, is currently in poor health in a penal colony.
But Wagner’s recent victory at Bakhmut after a grueling month-long struggle gave Mr. Prigozhin political carte blanche, said Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist and Kremlin critic.
“You are given everything, permission to break the law, to take people out of prison without asking anyone’s permission, to kill those people if you don’t like them for reasons of discipline,” Mr Oreshkin said of the terms of the deal between them Mr. Putin and Mr. Prigozhin. “If he hadn’t achieved that victory, he would have been torn apart by the elites he belittled.”
“It was a matter of life and death for him.”
Milana Mazaeva contributed to the coverage.
A correction has been made
May 24, 2023
:
Due to an editing error, the first name of the State Department spokesman was incorrect in a previous version of this article. The narrator is Matthew Miller, not Mark.
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