Two of Putin’s top army lieutenants have ‘openly declared war’ on Defense Minister and Putin loyalist Sergei Shoigu after a series of embarrassing defeats for the Kremlin in Ukraine.
Chechen chief Ramzan Kadyrov and the founder of Wagner’s ‘private army’ or militia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, have turned on the minister amid heavy defeats and losses in the past two weeks, The Guardian reports.
It comes after Russia illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions, including Donetsk and Luhansk, in an announcement that brought together all of the country’s top leaders and told the world the regions would “stay with Russia forever.”
But just 24 hours later, there was clear evidence that Ukraine was making great strides in the regions, taking back land that Putin had just claimed as part of Russia.
This week, developments in southern and eastern Ukraine continued, prompting the two army leaders to openly “declare war” on the defense minister, who is an easy target to blame for Russia’s poor military performance.
The Kremlin is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to save face and try to stop the Ukrainian advance, including the recruitment of prisoners fresh out of jail and now open infighting.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu speaks during a meeting in Moscow on Tuesday as senior figures declared war on him and his department.
The founder of Putin’s private militia, or Wagner unit, Yevgeny Prigozhin has had a long-running feud with the Defense Minister.
Chechnya’s regional leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, was among those who attended Moscow and signed the treaties that illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions on September 30.
“Putin is a very destructive personality, he will pit the different factions against each other and see what the best outcome will be,” a former Defense Ministry official told The Guardian.
‘He doesn’t know how to fix relationships, so in the end, someone will be a victim. Putin just wants to see what is best for him and the war in Ukraine.”
The feud between Prigozhin and Shoigu is said to date back long before the start of the seven-month war in Ukraine, and is said to have started after Prigozhin formed the Wagner unit during the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Wagner’s former commander, Marat Gabidullin, told The Guardian: “In the current wave of patriotism, he wants to position himself as a fierce defender of the fatherland who created a professional military organization.”
He wants to prove that he can fight better than the regular army. We always had tensions with the Ministry of Defense, we really didn’t like each other.
Prigozhin is now said to have teamed up with Chechen leader Kadyrov in an effort to oust the minister.
Kadyrov has established the North Caucasus republic in an effort to ally himself closely with Putin, but has publicly turned against the Defense Ministry in recent weeks, becoming one of his staunchest critics.
He claims his soldiers could take Kyiv “in a matter of days”, even after the Russian army has been forced back.
Shortly after last week’s Russian defeat at Lyman, a crucial railway hub in the Donetsk region, Kadyrov unleashed a withering attack on the Russian general staff and the commander of the central military district, Alexander Lapin.
In a series of messages on Telegram last week, the unlikely duo teamed up to launch scathing attacks on the defense strategy.
“The shame is not that Lapin is incompetent,” Kadyrov wrote.
‘It is that he is being protected from above by the leaders of the General Staff.
‘If it were up to me, I’d take him to a private, strip him of his medals and send him with a rifle to the front lines to cleanse his shame with blood.’
“Military nepotism will not lead to anything good,” he added.
Prigozhin added: ‘Beautiful, Ramzan, keep it up. These thugs should be sent to the front line barefoot with machine guns.
It is well known that Putin pits his inferiors against each other, a cunning strategy that prevents anyone from being too ambitious against him, but also breeds bitter rivalries at a time when the nation looks increasingly foolish on the national stage.
Russia now has to resort to increasingly desperate tactics, including recruiting dangerous criminals directly from its prisons.
Images circulating on social media, along with interviews conducted by The Guardian, show that Prigozhin himself is visiting prisons across the country and offering convicts freedom if they fight in Ukraine for six months.
They are said to receive only a week of training and are warned that they are unlikely to return from the front lines.
The measures are being pushed against the backdrop of increasingly embarrassing defeats for the Kremlin.
Just this morning, hours after Putin’s 70th birthday, Ukrainian saboteurs were thought to be behind a huge explosion that destroyed part of the only bridge linking Crimea to Russia, threatening already stretched Russian supply and reinforcement lines.
Although Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the attack, a Ukrainian official boasted that ‘Putin should be happy. Not everyone gets such an expensive birthday present’, a reference to the Russian president’s 70th birthday yesterday.
