The owner of the Wagner’s private military contractorYevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday that his forces have entered the Russian city of Rostov without facing any resistance.
Prigozhin said Wagner’s field camps were hit by rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery fire on the orders of Army Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov. He charged that Gerasimov issued the order after a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in which they decided to destroy Wagner.
He said Wagner’s troops were met by border guards as they moved into the Rostov region and are now driving into the city of Rostov. He said the youths recruited at the checkpoints withdrew and offered no resistance, adding that his forces “do not fight against children”.
“But we will destroy anyone who stands in our way,” he said. “We are moving forward and we will go all the way.”
Prigozhin on Friday called for an armed rebellion to oust Shoigu. The security services immediately reacted by opening a criminal investigation into Prigozhin.
Prigozhin released a series of angry video and audio recordings in which he accused Shoigu of ordering a rocket attack on Wagner Field Camps in Ukraine on Friday, where his troops are fighting on behalf of Russia.
Prigozhin said his troops would now punish Shoigu in an armed rebellion and urged the army not to offer resistance.
“This is not a military coup, but a march for justice,” Prigozhin declared.
The National Anti-Terrorism Committee, which is part of the Federal Security Services, said he would be investigated on charges of calling for an armed rebellion. State news agency Tass said President Vladimir Putin was kept informed.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later said Igor Krasnov, Russia’s attorney general, has spoken with Putin about the possibility of opening a criminal case against Prigozhin, according to Tass.
“We are monitoring the situation and will consult with allies and partners about these developments,” the US National Security Council told Reuters in a statement.
Wagner’s forces have played a crucial role in Russia’s war in Ukraine, managing to take the city where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place, Bakhmut. Prigozhin has often criticized Russia’s military brass, accusing them of incompetence and starving his troops of weapons and ammunition, but his accusations and calls for armed rebellion on Friday were a more direct challenge.
Russia’s Defense Ministry demanded that all military contractors sign contracts with it by July 1, but Prigozhin, whose feud with the Defense Ministry dates back years, refused to comply.
In a statement issued late Friday, he said he was ready to find a compromise with the Ministry of Defense but “we have been treacherously deceived.”
“Today they launched a rocket attack on our rear camps, and a large number of our comrades were killed,” he said.
Prigozhin claimed that Shoigu personally went to Russian army headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don to lead the attack on Wagner and then “cowardly” fled.
“This scum will stop,” he said, referring to Shoigu.
“The evil embodied by the country’s military leadership must be stopped,” he cried, urging the military to offer no resistance to Wagner as he moves to “restore justice.”
In other developments in Ukraine, war Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on other countries to heed warnings that Russia may be planning to attack an occupied nuclear power plant to cause a radiation disaster.
Members of his government briefed international representatives on the possible threat to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, whose six reactors have been shut down for months. Zelenskyy said he hoped other nations would “give the right signals and put pressure” on Moscow.
“Our principle is simple: the world must know what the occupier is preparing. Everyone who knows must act,” Zelenskyy said Thursday afternoon. “The world has enough power to prevent any radiation incident, let alone a radiation catastrophe.”
The Kremlin spokesman has denied that the threat to the plant comes from Russian forces.
The possibility of a life-threatening release of radiation has been a concern since Russian troops invaded Ukraine last year and seized the plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. The head of the UN atomic energy agency spent months trying to negotiate the establishment of a security perimeter to protect the facility as nearby areas came under repeated bombing, but has been unsuccessful .
The International Atomic Energy Agency noted on Thursday that “the military situation has become increasingly tense” as a Ukrainian counteroffensive launched this month unfolds in Zaporizhzhia province, where the plant of the same name is located , and in an adjacent part of Donetsk province.
Although the last of the plant’s six reactors was shut down last fall to reduce the risk of a meltdown, experts have warned that radiation could still be released if the system that keeps the reactors’ cores cool reactors and spent nuclear fuel loses energy or water.
During months of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have traded blame over which side increased the threat to the plant. On Friday, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi met with the head of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave to discuss the plant’s conditions. Rosatom director Alexey Likachev and other officials “stressed that they now expect specific steps” from the United Nations agency to prevent Ukrainian attacks on the plant and its adjacent territory, a statement from the Russian corporation, whose divisions build and operate nuclear power plants.
Earlier this week, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of exploiting the plant’s cooling system, already under threat from a dam collapse earlier this week that released water in a reservoir used by the power plant.
Elsewhere in the southern Zaporizhzhia province, Governor Yuriy Malashko reported Friday that Russian airstrikes killed two people last day. And in Kherson province, a Russian attack that hit a transport company in the capital killed three people, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
Russia also fired 13 cruise missiles overnight at a military airfield in the western province of Khmelnytskyi, but Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted all of them, the air force said. The attack came after Russian-appointed officials said missiles fired by Ukraine damaged a bridge that serves as a key supply link to occupied areas of southern Ukraine. The photos showed that the Russians had erected a pontoon bridge as a bypass. Ukrainian authorities reported Russian soldiers on strike hiding in an old wine factory near Henichesk. Russian state news agency Tass reported that two were killed in the attack.
Russia’s air-launched Kh-101 and Kh-555 missiles were sent from the Caspian Sea, the air force said. He did not identify the targeted airfield, but Ukraine has an airbase near the city of Starokostiantyniv in the Khmelnytskyi region.
The base is home to fighter jets and bombers, and five years ago hosted a training exercise with air force personnel from the United States, Ukraine and seven European countries. It has been under Russian attack before, including in the last month.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Friday that Russia has strengthened its defense forces in southern Ukraine in response to the initial counteroffensive and has stepped up its efforts to seize more ground in the east. Asked whether the initial strikes by the Ukrainian military set the stage for a larger assault, Maliar told Ukrainian television: “We have yet to see the main events and the main blow. And indeed, a part of the reserves will be used later.”
Ukrainian forces have so far made only incremental gains in Zaporizhzhia province, one of four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year. Putin has pledged to defend the regions as Russian territory.
Zelenskyy has said Ukraine is fighting to force Russian troops out of those regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 and is using as a staging and supply route in the war of 16 months. If the counteroffensive breaks through Russian defenses in the south, Ukrainian forces could try to reach a pair of occupied port cities on the Sea of Azov and break through Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.
