The head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group has vowed to "go all the way" to topple Russia's military leadership, hours after the Kremlin accused him of "armed rebellion". Russian strongman Yevgeny Prigozhin said he was leading his Wagner forces into Russia after being accused of organising an “armed uprising” in retaliation for what he claimed was an air strike against his own paramilitaries. The FSB, Russia’s main security service, launched a criminal case against the founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group for leading the country’s first coup attempt in three decades as Prigozhin vowed a “march of justice” against the army. He also claimed to have shot down a Russian helicopter. The alleged coup attempt began on Friday evening, when Prigozhin’s press team posted voice memos in which he said a “huge number” of fighters had been killed in an air strike and that Wagner would “respond to this evildoing”, in his most vitriolic tirade against his country’s military leadership to date.
Mr Prigozhin claimed that his forces had shot down a Russian military helicopter that "opened fire on a civilian convoy". He did not give a location and the assertion could not be immediately verified.
The Wagner Group is a private army of mercenaries that has been fighting alongside the regular Russian army in Ukraine.
Tension has been growing between them over how the war has been fought, with Mr Prigozhin launching vocal criticisms of Russia's military leadership in recent months.
On Friday, the 62-year-old mercenary leader accused the military of launching a deadly missile strike on his troops and vowed to punish them. He did not provide evidence.
Authorities have denied the strike and demanded he halt his "illegal actions".
Right now, none of this looks organized enough to be a coup. But coups sometimes look ridiculous in the offing—the 1991 coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a complete clown show—so the possibility remains that Prigozhin has friends in Moscow who are working with him. Military failure has been known to threaten the stability of Russia’s governments in the past, as Russian imperial leaders endured in 1905 and then again, for the last time, in 1917.
Kolesnikov notes that the vast majority of Russians who are mostly apathetic or unwilling to make larger sacrifices could be frightened and appalled by that message.
He cautions against overestimating Prigozhin’s clout and political prospects, and underestimating Putin’s authority.
“It’s enough for the commander-in-chief to move his finger to make the Wagner chief disappear,” Kolesnikov said.
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