On the evening of Friday, June 23, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin effectively broke ties with Moscow and initiated a mutiny against the Russian military, successfully occupying Rostov. At the time of writing on the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, Prigozhin appears to have accepted a pause in further escalation, stating that Wagner forces will return to base.
How Prigozhin used Telegram to declare war on the Russian Ministry of Defense β and then suddenly pull back. Amid chaos in the Russian information space the Kremlin attempts to limit information on Prigozhin. Valery Gerasimov. The Wagner founder blamed them for ineptitude over the course of the war in Ukraine, including a months-long public argument about supplying his forces with adequate munitions during its siege of Bakhmut.
At am Moscow time, he posted a thirty-minute video to his Prigozhin Press Service Telegram channel excoriating the MoD, accusing its leadership of deceiving Putin and the Russian public in early into believing that Ukrainian aggression was imminent, and that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine.
Sitting in a chair in front of a Wagner Group flag pinned to an otherwise blank wall, Prigozhin proceeded to make his case against the MoD and its entire war effort. He went on to blame Shoigu for killing thousands of capable Russian soldiers, and he directed his ire at Russian oligarchs enriching themselves on the war while seeking to return former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to power.
As angry audio clips of Prigozhin continued to appear into the evening, multiple pro-Wagner Telegram channels circulated a video around pm Moscow time purporting to document the aftermath of a Russian airstrike on a Wagner encampment. The video shows scenes of a wooded area lined with stone paths subjected to a moderate amount debris and several fires burning in trenches; a body is briefly seen towards the end of the clip.
