In one of his latest online rants, the founder of the Russian mercenary company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, for the first time unleashed his arrows on Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, stripping him of the immunity he was under. It is becoming more and more difficult for Russians to fight in Ukraine.

With an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive causing concern both in Moscow and in the occupied Donbass and Crimea, the resistance of the indomitable Ukrainian fighters in the tormented Bakhmut (Donetsk region) paid off for the defenders, resulting in not only repelling Russian attacks, but also the retreat of the Russians is not less than 2-3 kilometers south of the city.

Prigozhin, who had been protesting for months against the political and military leadership of Russia’s regular troops, this time turned on Putin himself, rising to a new level of anger and desperation. And he can be accused of being a cynical extreme professional killer, but not that he does not know what he is talking about.

In one of his last posts, the head of Wagner, who had captured Bakhmut for several months, accused Moscow of being inactive, allowing the Ukrainians to nullify the recent achievements of his mercenary group.

“The situation on the western flanks is developing according to the worst-case scenario that we predicted,” Prigozhin said in a recorded message released on Thursday. “These lands, liberated by the blood and lives of our comrades, are now being abandoned almost without a fight by those who should guard our side,” he complained, two days after admitting that regular Russian forces retreated to meet Ukrainian resistance for three days. kilometers of the periphery of Bahamut.

But that is not all. He lashed out at Russian political and military leadership, surpassing Russian data, accusing Moscow of preferring to leave missiles in storage and soldiers to die.

“The shells are in storage, they rest there,” he said. “Why are the shells in the warehouses? There are people who are fighting, and there are those who once realized that there should be a reserve [πυρομαχικών]and they keep, keep, keep those stocks. … No one knows why,” he said angrily, before launching his latest attack on Putin himself.

“Instead of wasting a shell to destroy the enemy, they kill our soldiers. AND happy grandpa he thinks it’s right.”

It’s not just that Prigozhin denounces the stance of the 70-year-old Russian president, who does not respond to the tactics of his apparatus at a time when hawks in Russia ask him for a more decisive response on the ground … It’s also that the Wagnerian leader chooses the expression “grandfather”, that is, the same as the imprisoned Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, in relation to Putin, calls him “grandfather in the trenches.”

Soon after this delirium, Prigozhin hastened to make amends by pretending that the reference to “grandfather” refers not to Putin, but to Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff in Moscow, whom he again accused of Wagner receiving only 10% of the weapons promised to her.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, assessed on Twitter that: “Unless the Kremlin responds to Prigozhin’s escalating attack on Putin, it could further undermine the norm of the Putin system in which individual actors can compete for dominance and influence, but no one can directly criticize Putin.”

Speculation centers on whether Prigozhin is politically expendable, whether his outbursts are some kind of clever deception operation, or, more worryingly for Putin, whether the system of reverence that keeps the Kremlin afloat is starting to crumble.

“This cannot be in the Putin system,” wrote Sergei Radchenko, a Cold War historian and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in a recent tweet. “Putin’s system allows pawns and officers to attack each other, but never undermines the king. Prigogine crosses this line. Either Putin will respond and Prigozhin will burn, or, if this does not happen, a signal will be immediately given that the boss is mortally weakened. And it’s a system that doesn’t respect weakness.”

Source: CNN