Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner’s mercenary group, responded on Sunday to comparisons between him and Rasputin, who treated the last tsar’s son for hemophilia, saying his job was not to stop the bleeding but to spill Russia’s blood. enemies, reports Reuters.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times wrote about Prigozhin’s growing influence in the Kremlin, comparing him to that of the Orthodox monk Grigory Rasputin, who had considerable influence over the wife of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II.

Only last September, Prigozhin admitted that he founded the Wagner group, which plays an important role in the Russian military’s attempts to conquer Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

“I am not very familiar with the history of Rasputin, but as far as I know, an important quality of Rasputin was that he used spells to stop the blood flow of the young prince,” Prigozhin’s press service said, quoting him. to an article published in the Financial Times.

“Unfortunately, I do not stop the flow of blood. I make the enemies of our country bleed. And not by spells, but by direct contact with them,” Prigozhin wanted to clarify.

Wagner’s mercenary group has been deployed to several African countries, usually to fight insurgencies. In recent months, Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared on the Internet in a video, trying to lure prisoners from Russian prisons to join his group to fight in Ukraine.

It is not the first time that the Financial Times has compared his role in relations with the Kremlin to that played by Rasputin at the Russian imperial court. A Russian journalist made the same comparison last year.

The newspaper notes that Prigozhin, like the leader of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, another active supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, “positioned himself as a fervent critic of the political, military, bureaucratic and business elites, who apparently failed Putin with their incompetent and reluctant approach to war”.

Prigozhin said the comparisons were “absolutely understandable” and his role was to bring Westerners back on track. “When children are mischievous, they try to get their father’s attention with all sorts of unexpected tricks,” he wrote. “So all Americans have to do is go to daddy, apologize and keep on behaving normally.”

Rasputin was assassinated in 1916 by a group of Russian nobles who feared his growing influence over the royal family.

(source: Agerpres)