Little by little, details of the aborted armed rebellion last weekend and why it occurred are becoming known. This last question was shed some light this Thursday by a veteran Russian deputy, who told the Russian media that before the failed uprising they warned the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, that he would lose state funding if his men did not sign a contract with the Ministry. of Defense and placed themselves at their command.
On June 10, the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, ordered that any detachment of volunteers, of which there are more than 40, including mercenary groups, be integrated into the Russian Armed Forces before July 1 by means of a contract that legalizes their situation and equates them to the rest of professional soldiers.
According to Defense, the formalization of contracts would give the volunteer detachments the necessary legal status. In addition, it will allow creating uniform approaches for all combat forces, which means an increase in their effectiveness on the battlefield. It would also allow Moscow to exercise control over private armies fighting in Ukraine alongside Russia.
But Shoigu’s order was a new reason for confrontation between the Ministry of Defense and Prigozhin, also coinciding with the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive to recover the territory occupied by Russian troops.
The oligarch, who would thus lose control of his private military company, said a day later that he flatly refused to sign with the Defense Department. In addition, he took the opportunity to attack the Defense Minister, a personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin for years. Shoigu, said the oligarch, “cannot properly manage military formations.” And he maintained that his mercenary group is an independent and “highly effective” structure.
Then the Russian authorities warned him that if his fighters did not sign contracts with Defense, the Wagner Group would be excluded from the military campaign in Ukraine, said Thursday the deputy Andrei Kartapolov, who chairs the Defense Commission in the Duma (Lower House of Parliament). , quoted by the RT television channel (formerly Russia Today) and by the Ría Nóvosti agency.
“And that means that there would be no more money, neither financial nor material resources. And for Mr. Prigozhin, money is an important, perhaps decisive factor,” the MP continued.
Kartapolov added that as a result of this situation, Prigozhin “changed his position and deceived his fellow fighters.”
On Friday, June 23, Prigozhin called for the rebellion after accusing the Defense of having attacked the camp of his mercenaries, something the ministry denied and described as a “provocation”.
A day later the men of this private army, 25,000 according to Prigozhin, took the city of Rostov-on-Don under their control and marched on Moscow. The crisis was resolved at night, when an agreement was reached with the mediation of the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. The Kremlin agreed not to prosecute the rebels, but Prigozhin has had to go live in exile in Belarus.
Putin admitted for the first time last Tuesday that the Russian state had financed the Wagner Group. In a meeting with the military, the Kremlin chief said that the group led by Prigozhin received 86 billion rubles (about 922 million euros) from the Ministry of Defense between May 2022 and May 2023.
