If there was ever a time for the Kremlin to worry about an uprising by its runaway private army, it seems now is.
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has accused the Russian military of treason and flooded the internet with gruesome photos of the country’s war dead.
“Who is to blame for her death? Blame those who should have solved the problem of supplying enough ammunition,” Prigozhin said in a comment to a pro-war Telegram channel on Wednesday, citing Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov. A day earlier, he accused both of trying to “destroy” the Wagner group by deliberately choking off their ammunition supplies.
To get his point across on Wednesday, he posted a photo showing rows and rows of bloody and mutilated corpses, which he said were Wagner fighters killed trying to seize the Kremlin’s control of Ukraine to keep.
“No steps were taken to issue ammunition. I post a photo below, this is one of the collection points for the dead. These are guys who died yesterday from starvation for ammo. There should have been five times less of them,” Prigozhin said.
“Wagner, like a crowdfunded beggar, is asking the unit commanders to help in any way. We will not leave Bakhmut. We’re just going to die twice as often until they’re all gone. And when the Wagernites go out, Shoigu and Gerasimov will most likely have to use machine guns,” he said.
While Prigozhin has never been shy about blowing up Russia’s top military officials, his outrage is quickly spreading among the ranks of military bloggers, whom the Kremlin has relied on to bolster public support for the war.
And it threatens to overshadow the “everything is going according to plan and we are all united” message that Putin plans to send ahead of the one-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion, when the Kremlin has little territorial gains and an overall generation of young dead men to advocate for to show the military conquest.
Even as Putin took the stage at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium for his pro-war rally on Wednesday, Wagner supporters (or bots) flooded the chat of an online livestream of the event with angry messages, urging the military to “Wagner ammunition!”
Prigozhin – known for his role in commanding armies of Russian trolls long before he admitted to being the mercenary group’s puppeteer – was suspected of unleashing the messages. Several pro-Kremlin Telegram channels have also started conducting polls about who supporters want to see win in the “terrible confrontation” – Shoigu and Gerasimov or Prigozhin.
Ninety-six percent of the more than 15,000 people who responded to a poll on Tuesday voted for Prigozhin.
But anger at the Russian military command has already spread far beyond Prigozhin and even Wagner.
Igor Bezler, one of the most prominent deputy Kremlin commanders from Russia’s first wave of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, recently demanded the killing of Shoigu and Gerasimov in an intercepted call with an FSB officer, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
“First Shoigu has to be shot and then Gerasimov, shit. And then half your damn FSB gets hanged and their asses put on stakes and then we start fighting,” said a man identified as Bezler, in the tone of the alleged call.
“As long as all these morons are in power… it’s all utter nonsense,” he said, railing against “stupid” Putin and other rulers before shouting, “Our leaders are fucking idiots!”
Bezler wasn’t the only one who came up with the idea of putting a “bullet in the head” on the country’s top military officials.
Telegram channel Gray Zone, affiliated with Wagner, shared a letter on Wednesday that appeared to refer to unnamed military officials, saying that if they lacked the “honor” to kill themselves for their mistakes, that’s the least they could do , take off their uniforms to stop bringing “shame.”