During the uprising, a leader of Russian mercenaries questioned the Kremlin’s propaganda that justified Russia’s war against Ukraine. His criticism stems from a pattern older than the enlightening statements of various Russian imperialists about Putin’s regime.

Until recently, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the sixty-two-year-old head of the Kremlin-affiliated private military company Wagner, known only among Eastern European experts, became known throughout the world. An unsuccessful but impressive show of strength by the mercenary leader and his armed group showed the fragility of Putin’s system. Suddenly it turned out that the Russian emperor had no clothes.

What has attracted less attention in the context of the uprising is that Prigozhin questioned the Kremlin’s main justification for Russia’s current large-scale attack on Ukraine. As of February 20, 2022, Putin and other Kremlin spokesmen have repeatedly stated that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a preventive and defensive war. There are even Western observers who consider Putin’s claim that NATO threatens Russia a legitimate argument.

Instead, in a video message on June 23, 2023, shortly before the start of his “March of Justice” in Moscow, Prigozhin stated: “Nothing extraordinary happened on February 24, 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense is deceiving the public by claiming now. that Ukraine behaved insanely aggressively, as if Ukraine and all of NATO wanted to attack us. The special operation, which began on February 24, has a completely different background.”

Then Prigozhin attacked the Russian military leadership. The latter, according to him, hoped for a quick victory in Ukraine and further advancement in Moscow: “What was the war for? The war was so that a bunch of shit could just triumph, go out in public and show.” what a mighty army they are [ministrul rus al apărării, Serghei] Shoigu to obtain a scientific degree [cel mai înalt grad militar al Rusiei] marshal Decree [de promovare] he was already ready. And for receiving the second Hero Star [adică o înaltă distincție rusă]. [Șoigu] he really wanted to go down in history as a great Tuvan commander who became a double hero [al Rusiei] and actually a peacetime marshal. The war was not necessary to return de facto Russians to our territory. This was not done for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. The star needed the war [pe epoleții lui Șoigu]. […] And secondly: the war was necessary for the oligarchs, it was necessary for the clan that today de facto rules Russia. This oligarchic clan gets everything it can. When the foreign companies of this clan are closed, the state immediately divides the domestic companies and transfers them to this clan. Therefore, businessmen are jailed, banks are closed so that this clan does not lose the volume of its funds.”

Although Prigozhin here inflates the secondary actors in the Russian leadership, his statement was basically correct. Putin’s escalation of the war against Ukraine in February 2022 was motivated by domestic rather than foreign policy.

In another provocative video message released a month earlier, Prigozhin already questioned the second key element of Kremlin propaganda. On May 23, 2023, he commented on the alleged “denazification” of Ukraine by Russia in his Telegram channel: “We came with a bang and walked with boots all over Ukraine, looking for Nazis. While we were looking for Nazis, we screwed everything up. above”.

In themselves, such statements are not extraordinary, but to hear them from the mouth of the main executor of Russia’s war against Ukraine is something unusual. The mercenary leader actually denies Moscow’s official justifications for Russian aggression. Paradoxically, this also applies to the reason for the placement of the Wagner Prigozhin Group – it is recognized as militants waging a war for money or a reduction in prison terms, and not for a greater purpose.

Being the main imperialist pawn of Russia, with his attacks on Putin, Prigozhin continues the long tradition of post-Soviet nationalist politicians. Volodymyr Zhirynovsky (1946-2022) and Igor Girkin (b. 1970), for example, many years ago already attracted attention with statements no less shameful for the Kremlin. Far-right critics of the Putin regime have repeatedly publicly accused the Kremlin of lying.

In mid-September 1999, a memorable incident took place in the State Duma of Russia, which was later made public by Zhirynovsky. A series of terrorist attacks in Russia in 1999, attributed to Chechen terrorists, served as an excuse for the Kremlin to start the second Chechen war. Moscow’s new war in the Caucasus was popular among the frightened Russian population. And the campaign of the Russian army in the Chechen Republic with its mass murders became an important impetus for the rapid rise of the then new head of government, not yet president, Vladimir Putin.

The explosion of a residential building in the city of Volgodonsk, in the south of Russia, on September 16, 1999, allegedly by Caucasian terrorists, took place under strange circumstances. The attack was announced three days before it happened at the State Duma meeting in Moscow. It seems that a secret plan to blow up a building in Volgodonsk and its subsequent political instrumentalization by the Federal Security Service (FSB) has been leaked. (Putin headed the FSB until he became prime minister in August 1999, after which his St. Petersburg assistant Mykola Patrushev headed domestic intelligence).

In 2002, Zhirynovsky reported on the events of September 13, 1999 in the Russian parliament: “Someone from the secretariat brought the note. [Dumei de Stat]. Apparently, they were called to warn the speaker of the Duma about such a turn of events [adică atacul terorist]. [Președintele Parlamentului, Gennady] Zheleznyov read us the news about the explosion. Then I was waiting for television news to show the event in Volgodonsk.”

This explosion took three days. It happened on September 16, 1999.

Like Prigozhin in 2023, Zhirinovsky must have been aware of the explosive nature (for Putin’s regime) of his statement in 2002. His statement called into question the legitimacy, authority and integrity of the new Russian president. Prigozhin’s video messages in recent months also undermine Putin’s justification for a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Nine years ago, another exposure of the famous Russian paramilitary leader and former “defense minister” of the so-called DPR Igor Girkin about the pseudo-civil war of 2014-2015 in eastern Ukraine took place. Since the beginning of the alleged uprising in Donbas in the spring of 2014, there has been a controversy about the beginning of the war not only in Russian media, but also in non-Russian ones. Even some Western analysts see the main sources of the armed conflict in the Donetsk Basin not in Russian politics, but – as Kremlin propaganda claims – in Ukrainian politics.

In an interview with the far-right Russian weekly “Zavtra” in November 2014, Girkin said: “I pulled the trigger on the war. If our unity [armată] he would not cross the border [din Rusia în Ucraina]everything would have gone like in Kharkiv [nord-estul Ucrainei] and Odessa [sudul Ucrainei]”. In the latter city and in other Russian-speaking cities of Ukraine, unlike Donbas, at that time only unarmed agents of Moscow were active. Girkin also noted: “our unit gave the impetus to the war that continues today.” [armată]. I shuffled all the cards that were on the table. All!”

It is indicative in Girkin’s confession that he, as the commander of an irregular battalion and a citizen of Russia, has neither biographical nor family ties to Donbas. As a former Russian intelligence officer, he was in constant contact with Russian state authorities during his paramilitary advance into eastern Ukraine in April 2014. As detailed in Jakob Gauther’s forthcoming book, Russia’s Undetected Invasion: The Causes of the 2014 War in Ukraine’s Donbass, “Ghirkin and company acted as unofficial agents of the Russian government in that interstate war, still by proxy, against Ukraine. – Read full article and comment on Contributors.ro