Wagner mercenary boss faces arrest over ‘incitement to armed rebellion’
The Wagner founder seemed to cross a new red line in his video comments earlier Friday, when he shot down Putin’s central main pretexts for invading Ukraine, declaring that Russia faced no extraordinary threat from Ukraine. He said that Russian military officials had deceived Putin into going to war.
The war, he claimed, was designed by Russian officials and oligarchs who had plundered two separatist regions of Donbas for years, but grew greedy and wanted to plunder all of Ukraine. “The war was not needed to return our Russian citizens to our bosom and not to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine,” Prigozhin said.
Prigozhin, with a high profile globally and domestically, gained a reputation in Russian nationalist circles for telling harsh truths about the war that the military would rather hide. But his Friday claim that Putin had been deceived went well beyond his frequent rants against top military officials and Russian oligarchs, because it undermined Putin’s key argument to Russians — and leaders in the Global South — that Russia had “no choice” but to launch a preemptive invasion because Ukraine was committing “genocide” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and was planning a massive attack with NATO’s support on Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
https://apple.news/AB4ZsYI14THKEKUMcC497Ewhttps://news.yahoo.com/wagner-chief-vows-stop-russia-195459412.html
