A key Putin ally says the Kremlin's justifications for its invasion of Ukraine are based on lies.
June 23, 2023, 12:13 PMYevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, addresses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a video released by Prigozhin Press Service, March 3, 2023, from an unspecified location in Ukraine., Yevgeny Prigozhin, said the Kremlin's justifications for its invasion of Ukraine are based on lies, in another extraordinary attack on the country's military and political leadership.
"The ministry of defense now is trying to deceive society, the president, and tell a story there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they intended to attack us with the whole NATO bloc," Prigozhin said. Prigozhin also said in Friday's video that the two goals Putin announced at the start of the war— the "demilitarization" and "de-Nazification" of Ukraine—were "pretty stories."
Prigozhin did not directly attack Putin in the video, instead claiming the president was being deceived by his generals and other figures around him. In reality though, Putin—not Shoigu—has taken the lead in making the claims around Donbas and de-Nazification the central justifications of the war, reciting them in his speech declaring his "Special Military Operation."
Prigozhin lambasted Russia's military leadership for the huge casualties its troops have suffered. He accused Shoigu of hollowing out the armed forces under Putin through corruption and cronyism, crippling its ability to fight effectively and then catastrophically botching the invasion after believing it would be an easy victory."Someone should answer for the lives of those soldiers," Prigozhin said in Friday's video.
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