RUSSIAN mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Monday (June 26) that a one-day mutiny by his Wagner force had been intended not to overthrow Russia's government but to register a protest over what he said was its ineffectual conduct of the conflict in Ukraine.
In his first public comments since ending the mutiny late on Saturday, Prigozhin repeated his frequent claim that Wagner was the most effective fighting force in Russia "and even the world," and that it put to shame the units that Moscow had sent into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
He said the way it had been able to seize the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don without bloodshed and to send an armed convoy to within 200 km of Moscow had been testament to the effectiveness of his fighters.
"We showed a master class, as it should have been on Feb. 24, 2022. We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government," he said in an 11-minute audio message released on the Telegram messaging app.
Prigozhin renewed an allegation, so far unsupported by evidence, that the Russian military had attacked a Wagner camp with missiles and then helicopters, killing about 30 of its men, and said this had been the immediate trigger for what he called a "march of justice."
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