Prigozhin the revived: after a week of silence and while the deepest mystery about his whereabouts persists, the head of Wagner returns to be heard in a 40-second audio to announce “new victories at the front in the near future”. A message that raises even more questions about its fate, also due to the methods of diffusion: no longer on the Telegram channel of its Concord holding, but on Gray Zone, another channel, and only one, of the galaxy that revolves around Wagner.
Zelensky: “Putin invaded my Ukraine to destroy the idea of freedom”
Volodymyr Zelensky*
Even the brevity of the audio suggests a very different reality from when, before the attempted mutiny of June 24, Yevgeny Prigozhin launched long invectives and threats against Russia’s military leaders, conveyed by the official Concord channel, Press-Sluzhba Prigozhina. Now the former Kremlin cook has barely time to reiterate that the advance undertaken towards Moscow was “a march of justice aimed at fighting the traitors and mobilizing society”. But Prigozhin’s number one target, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, speaking today for the first time about what happened, denounced plans to destabilize Russia, saying they “failed because the armed forces showed loyalty to their oath and their duties”. “Today we need your support more than ever, thank you for this”, Prigozhin articulates again in his message, addressing who knows who: whether to the Russians in general or to the Wagner militiamen.
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Nothing is known about the fate of the latter either. It is unclear how many of them have decided to follow their boss to Belarus. Nor is it clear on which “front” the private company should obtain the “new victories”. In recent days, the chairman of the defense commission of the Duma, Andrei Kartapolov, had said that the Wagner would no longer be used in Ukraine. Still Gray Zone, however, writes that the Wagner militiamen are already training, also with the use of tanks and heavy weapons, near Osipovichi, southeast of Minsk. The fact that today’s audio was not broadcast by Concord’s Telegram channel seems to confirm the ongoing process of dismantling not only the military but also the media and commercial empire of the head of Wagner. And now thousands of Concord employees could risk their jobs.
Even the former president Dmitry Medvedevwho remained silent for over a week after the Wagner rebellion, has returned to posting his daily Telegram comments, the latest stating that «a nuclear apocalypse is not only possible, but also quite probable». Today, Medvedev added, the world is at the mercy of a “much worse” confrontation than during the Cuban missile crisis.
Meanwhile, with an almost paradoxical answer to Ukrainian accusations against Russia of having deported about 20,000 childrenRussian Senator Grigory Karasin spoke about a number 35 times higher, i.e. 700,000, transferred from war zones to Russian territory in recent years. However, according to Karasin, these are children who were rescued from the fighting. Moscow has always denied having taken them away against parental consent, stating that the transferred minors can be taken back to Ukraine when the situation makes it possible.
Finally, as regards the land, the Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Hanna Malyar, said that the troops of Kiev have reconquered 37 square kilometers of territory in the east and south in the last week and another Deputy Minister, Oleksandr Pavliuk, he said 5,000 Russian soldiers had been eliminated. However, President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted that it was “a difficult week on the front lines”. While the governor of the Russian-controlled part of Zaporizhzhia province, Yevgeny Balitsky, claimed that since the start of the counteroffensive, 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been eliminated in this oblast alone.
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The case – Nuclear obsession: Medvedev returns to threaten the world
Ukraine: pro-Russian Zaporizhzhia, switched to active defense and counterattack
In the Zaporizhzhia region, the Russian armed forces “have switched to active defence, i.e. they counterattack even with minimal risk to personnel”. This was explained to RIA Novosti by Vladimir Rogov, one of the pro-Russian leaders of Zaporizhzhia. As for the Ukrainian military, however, “they send waves of new forces to the massacre,” added Rogov.
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