After threatening to mount coup on Putin, Russian mercenary chief accused of ‘armed rebellion’

The long-running feud between Prigozhin and the Russian military over the war in Ukraine has now escalated into an open confrontation, setting up the biggest challenge to Putin’s authority since he launched his invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago.

Videos circulating widely on social media showed that military and national guard armored vehicles had been deployed in Moscow and the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, near the front line in Ukraine where Prigozhin’s fighters had been operating.

Prigozhin on Friday accused the Russian military of attacking his Wagner forces and, in a series of recordings posted to social media, pledged that his fighters would retaliate. Russian authorities, in turn, accused Prigozhin — whose broadsides against the Russian Defense Ministry had been tolerated by Putin for months — of trying to foment a revolt.

“This is a stab in the back of the country and the president,” Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy head of Russia’s military intelligence agency, said in a video appeal to Prigozhin’s fighters, urging them to call off any rebellion. “This is a coup.”

But Prigozhin said in one of a series of frantic audio messages on Telegram: “This is not a military coup. This is a march for justice. Our actions aren’t interfering with the troops in any way.”

Prigozhin’s Wagner force has proved pivotal to the Russian war effort in Ukraine, but in recent months, he repeatedly chastised Russia’s top brass for alleged corruption and indifference to regular soldiers’ lives. On Friday night, he took his accusations to a new level, claiming that the Russian military had attacked Wagner encampments, killing “a huge number of fighters.”

“The evil borne by the country’s military leadership must be stopped,” Prigozhin said in one of a series of voice recordings posted to the Telegram social network after 9 p.m. Moscow time.

Just past midnight Moscow time, Russia’s prosecutor general announced that Prigozhin was being investigated “on suspicion of organizing an armed rebellion” and would face as much as 20 years in prison if prosecuted.

There was no sign of the whereabouts of Prigozhin, and as of midnight Moscow time, his social media accounts had been silent for more than an hour.