Posted on 06/23/2023 12:07:27 PM PDT by marcusmaximus
The Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has said Russia’s defence ministry concocted false pretences to trick Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine and said Moscow could have avoided the war entirely.
In a half-hour tirade Prigozhin, founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, claimed Russia had faced no immediate threat from Ukraine when Putin began his full-scale invasion last year and accused the army’s top brass of deceiving the Russian president for their own personal gain.
The extraordinary rant, posted on social media on Friday, was the former caterer’s latest salvo in a long-running spat with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin has accused of sabotaging the war effort together with Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff.
Prigozhin’s regular diatribes, in which he claims Russia runs the risk of losing the war after Ukraine began a counteroffensive earlier this month, indicate elite infighting is getting fiercer as Moscow’s war effort continues to struggle.
Though Prigozhin notably refrained from criticising Putin personally and has backed the war’s goals, the video was the first time he publicly questioned Russia’s rationale for the full-scale invasion.
“There was nothing out of the ordinary on February 24,” said Prigozhin, referring to the day Putin ordered the invasion. “The defence ministry is trying to deceive the president and society by saying Ukraine was going mad with aggression and was planning to attack us together with the whole Nato bloc.”
Instead, Prigozhin claimed Shoigu had convinced Putin the war was necessary so “a bunch of bastards could rule the roost and show off about what a strong army they have”, then botched the invasion through “incompetent planning”.
“For some reason, this bunch of idiots thought they were so smart-assed that nobody would understand what they were up to or stop them on their way to Kyiv,” he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
What Rostov doink?
I hope your survival skills are top notch, because playing world cop is about to have a cost.
I would think we would be more likely to get into a war with Russia if we did not help Ukraine then if we did.
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