The armed rebellion of Wagner began this Friday when the head of the Russian mercenaries accused the Russian Defense Minister of order bombardments against their bases and asked for his arrest. “A missile attack has been carried out on the Wagner camps. Many victims. According to eyewitnesses, the blow was struck from behind, that is, it was struck by soldiers from the Russian Defense Ministry,” he cried. Yevgeny Prigozhin. Soon after, Russia opened a criminal investigation into Prigozhin for attempted military “riot”.
Hours later, already in the early hours of this Saturday, Prigozhin claimed that Wagner’s forces had entered the Russian city of Rostov meeting no resistance. Moscow and the highway that connects it with Rostov are taken by the Russian security forces in anticipation of a riot. According to the mercenary boss, his army has shot down in the early hours of this Saturday to a Russian helicopter that “fired on a column of civilians”. In addition, the governors of Rostov and Lipetsk, the latter halfway between Rostov and Moscow, asked the population keep calm and don’t leave home.
“A huge number of combatants died,” the creator of the most important mercenary company asserted in his complaint, warning that in the near future Wagner will decide “how to respond to this atrocity.” “That monstrosity will be stopped,” Prigozhin said of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. “We are bathing in our own blood. Time is running out fast,” he added.
He Ministry of Defense denied the attacks, they are not the first. In addition, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, quoted by the TASS news agency, stated that “President Putin has been informed of all the events around Prigozhin. The necessary measures are being taken.” Among those measures, the Russian Anti-Terrorism Committee reported the opening of a criminal case for calls for armed rebellion against Prigozhin, and the Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly KGB), He is in charge of opening that case.
Shortly before midnight, the FSB asked Wagner’s mercenaries to rebel against their boss: “We called on the fighters of the private army to not to make an irreparable mistake, cease any armed action against the Russian people, fail to comply with the criminal and treasonous orders of Prigozhin, take measures for his arrest,” the intelligence service said in a commentary quoted by Interfax. For its part, the deputy commander of the Russian campaign in Ukraine, The general Sergey Surovik too, He also urged the private militia fighters to abandon their opposition to the military leadership and return to their bases. However, the mercenaries began to leave Ukraine and enter Russia, according to Prigozhin.