Russia accused the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, of calling for an armed uprising on Friday after he said, without providing evidence, that Russian military commanders destroyed 2,000 of its soldiers and vowed to stop what he called “evil,” Reuters reported.

As the long-running standoff between him and the Ministry of Defense appears to be coming to a head, the ministry said Prigozhin’s allegations were “not true, but an information challenge.”

Prigozhin said that his actions did not constitute a military coup, but Russia’s FSB opened a criminal case against him on charges of calling for an armed uprising, the TASS news agency wrote on Friday, citing the National Anti-Terrorism Committee.

The Kremlin said that President Vladimir Putin had been informed and that “necessary measures are being taken.”

The standoff, many details of which remain unclear, has emerged as the biggest domestic crisis Putin has faced since he sent thousands of troops to Ukraine last February in what he called a “special military operation.”

For several months, Prigozhin openly accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian General Valery Gerasimov of incompetence and refusal to supply Wagner’s fighters with ammunition.

Prigozhin stated that the invasion of Ukraine was based on lies

Earlier, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner’s mercenary company, said on Friday that the Kremlin’s arguments for invading Ukraine were based on lies invented by his opponent, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

• “Nothing extraordinary happened on February 24… The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us the story that it was a crazy aggression on the part of Ukraine and that they planned to attack us with the whole of NATO,” Prigozhin said, calling the official version “beautiful history”.
• “It took a war … for Shoigu to become a marshal … for him to receive the second Hero medal [al Rusiei]. The war was not necessary for the demilitarization or denazification of Ukraine.”

He said that Moscow could have reached an agreement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the war, and that the conflict was a disaster for Russia, and that tens of thousands of lives were needlessly sacrificed, including members of Russia’s most capable forces.

Depicting senior officers as fools who drank vodka, brandy and caviar, he argued that corruption was hampering Russia’s military efforts.

“We are bathing in our own blood,” he said. “Time flies quickly.”

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