Authorities in Moscow have clamped down on security as the head of the Wagner mercenary group claimed to have seized control of all military sites in the city of Rostov-on-Don and demanded that Russia’s military leadership come to him after accusing them of killing his forces.
In videos posted on social media early on Saturday, Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that he was at the headquarters of the Southern Military District (SMD) in Rostov and demanded that defence minister Sergei Shoigu and Russia’s top general Valery Gerasimov come to the city, 1,000 kilometres south of Moscow. The videos could not be verified.
“We have arrived here, we want to receive the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” Prigozhin said in one video, seated between two senior Russian generals. “Unless they come, we’ll be here, we’ll blockade the city of Rostov and head for Moscow.”
He said that planes taking part in the Ukraine offensive were taking off as normal from the airfield, which was under Wagner control, and asked Russians not to believe what they were told on state television.
“When they tell you that PMC Wagner interfered with work and that’s why something on the front collapsed … Things on the front collapsed not for this reason,” he said, addressing Russians.
“A huge amount of territory is lost. Soldiers have been killed, three, four times more than what it says in documents shown to the top (leadership).”
Video and images circulating on social media showed armed men on the streets of Rostov, skirting the regional police headquarters in the city on foot, as well as tanks positioned outside the headquarters of the SMD, which is key to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was not possible to verify the footage.
In an extraordinary series of audio clips that he began to release late on Friday, Prigozhin had claimed that a Russian rocket attack had killed scores of his fighters, vowing to take “revenge” and “stop the evil brought by the military leadership of the country”.
In the early hours of Saturday, he then released another voice message in which he claimed that his forces had left Ukraine and were entering Rostov.
“Right now we have crossed all the border points … The border guards greeted us and hugged our fighters. Now we are entering Rostov,” he said. “If anyone gets in our way, we will destroy everything … We extend our hand to everyone. We move forward, we are going all the way!”
The FSB Security Service opened a criminal case for armed mutiny against Prigozhin and said his statements and actions constituted “calls for the start of an armed civil conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation”.
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that anti-terrorist measures were being taken in the Russian capital, including additional checks on roads, to reinforce security. Unconfirmed footage appeared to show military vehicles on the streets.
Authorities also said the M4 motorway, connecting Moscow with the south, was closed to traffic at the border with the Voronezh region due to the movement of a military convoy.
The Rostov region’s governor urged residents not to travel to the city centre and to avoid leaving their homes if possible. Vasily Golubev posted on Telegram that law enforcement agencies were doing “everything necessary to ensure the safety of residents in the area”.
Pictures published by local media earlier showed armoured vehicles on the city’s streets. Baza, a Telegram channel linked to Russian security services, reported that helicopters were seen flying over it.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said only that the Russian president was “aware of the situation unfolding around Prigozhin” and that “all necessary measures are being taken.” Putin himself has not made a statement.
General Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s Ukraine campaign, earlier released a video address ordering the mercenaries to remain loyal to Putin.
“I urge you to stop,” said Surovikin, who was previously understood to be close to Prigozhin. “The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country.”
State-run Channel 1 also broke into regular programming early Saturday for a special news bulletin in which the country’s best-known news anchor, Yekaterina Andreyeva, denied Prigozhin’s claims of a Russian military attack against his fighters and repeated the FSB statement.
The FSB urged Wagner fighters “not to make irreparable mistakes, to stop any forceful actions against the Russian people, not to carry out the criminal and treacherous orders of Prigozhin, and to take measures to detain him”.
The string of statements marked an unprecedented escalation of infighting among Russia’s elite, which has pitted Prigozhin against defence minister Sergei Shoigu and senior military commanders.
It was not immediately clear whether Prigozhin’s threats were also directed at the Kremlin.
“This is not a military coup, this is a march of justice. Our actions do not hinder the armed forces in any way,” the Wagner chief said in one message, adding that the “majority of soldiers” were on his side.
The warlord has been arguing with top military officials for months, singling out Shoigu, over battlefield failures.
Earlier on Friday, Prigozhin had accused Moscow’s leadership of lying to the public about the justifications for invading Ukraine, denying Moscow’s claims that Kyiv was planning to launch an offensive on the Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine in February 2022.
The tirade directly contradicted Putin’s rationale for the invasion and implied it was based on lies, in the harshest criticism by any prominent Russian war figure of the decision to attack Ukraine
“The ministry of defence is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole Nato block,” the Wagner head said.
Prigozhin also said Russia’s leadership could have avoided the war by negotiating with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“What was the war for? The war needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star … The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” he said.
Tatyana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R Politik, said that after months of testing the boundaries of his power, Prigozhin appeared to have reached a limit.
“The termination of Prigozhin and Wagner is imminent. The only possibility now is absolute obliteration, with the degree of resistance from the Wagner group being the only variable,” she wrote on Telegram.
She added that while there was no immediate sign that Vladimir Putin’s hold on power was under threat, the dramatic episode will likely damage his standing.
“Many within the elite will now personally fault Putin for letting the situation escalate to such extremes and for his lack of a timely adequate response.”
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based thinktank, also said the attempt to topple the defence ministry’s leadership was “unlikely to succeed” given Prigozhin was unlikely to win support from Russian military officers and that Putin had recently aligned himself more firmly with the MoD.