An angry Yevgeny Prigozhin yells at Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov. Screenshot/press service from Prigozhin/Telegram
- Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin attacked the Kremlin in an eloquent video on Thursday.
- He lashed out at the Russian defense minister and a top general, accusing them of a lack of ammunition.
- Prigozhin called the couple “animals” and said they were responsible for the deaths of his men.
The head of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, released a video on Thursday in which he yelled and verbally abused the two top Kremlin officials.
His latest video, released on his press service’s Telegram channel, contains the military contractor’s harshest public comments about Russia’s leaders since the war began.
“Here are the guys from PMC Wagner who died today. The blood is still fresh,” Prigozhin says in the video, which Insider saw.
“Film them all,” he says to a cameraman panning across a grassy clearing filled with rows of corpses in combat fatigues.
Prigozhin then launches an expletive-filled tirade against Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, who put Putin in charge of running the war in Ukraine.
He cursed at least nine times in the video, although his press service censored the swear words.
“We have a 70% ammo shortage! shoigu! Gerasimov! where to [beep] is the ammunition?” Prigozhin yells in the video.
He cried that military leaders who would not give his troops ammunition would be “eaten in hell”.
“You animals hang out in expensive clubs,” continued an indignant Prigozhin. “Their children enjoy their lives and make videos for YouTube. Do you believe that you are the masters of this life and have the right to control their life?”
Prigozhin claimed that the death toll among his troops would have been five times lower had they been supplied with enough ammunition.
“They came here as volunteers,” he said, referring to the dead in the video. “And desperately want you to roll in clover in your mahogany offices.
Prigozhin, usually seen as a close ally of Putin, now repeatedly complains that his troops are running out of supplies and blames Russia’s top forces for cutting him off and dooming his men in Ukraine.
He said his forces receive only a fifth of the shells they need each day and the shortage is costing his men their lives.
On Saturday, Prigozhin said his troops at Bakhmut would have to “retreat or die” in the face of the massive ammunition shortage. He later added that his organization lost more than 100 people in a single day in an attack there.
Fighting in the eastern Ukrainian region was brutal. Wagner’s ground forces, led by Prigozhin, are one of Russia’s main forces stationed there. According to Western estimates, both Kiev and Moscow have lost thousands of men in Bakhmut in recent months.
In 2022, the Wagner group drew a scandal for recruiting Russian convicts to fight in Ukraine and promising the prisoners their freedom. As of July 2022, over 40,000 ex-convicts have joined Wagner, according to US officials.
Poorly equipped and poorly trained, most Wagner soldiers died, according to The New York Times.
The mercenary group stopped recruiting prisoners in February after realizing that convicts were beginning to view their offer as a death sentence and, according to local media, refused to go along with it.
The press service of the Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, which was broadcast outside of regular business hours.
Translation by Oleksandr Vynogradov.
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