Armed men surround Rostov as Russian coup fears mount

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Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed his forces were “blockading” Rostov and marched on Moscow on Saturday morning as masked fighters with tanks and armored vehicles surrounded the government in the southern Russian city building.

In marking Russia’s first coup in three decades, Prigozhin appeared to take over a major military headquarters in Rostov, where he was filmed snarling at a deputy defense minister and a top Russian general, accusing him of Attempts to overthrow the leadership of the army. .

The extraordinary scenes were part of what Prigozhin called a “march for justice” against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian invasion force commander Valery Gerasimov, the notorious paramilitary Organization Wagner has been at odds with them for months over its handling of the Ukraine invasion.

“We want (Gerasimov) and Shoigu. Until they arrive, we will stay, block Rostov, and go to Moscow,” Prigorzhin told Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bak Yeh Vkurov and Russian Military Intelligence Deputy Director Vladimir Alekseev. “We are saving Russia.”

In another video released shortly afterwards, Prigozhin said Wagner had taken control of “military installations in Rostov, including the airport,” but had not impeded the invasion of Ukraine.

“The way we do it is so that the attack planes don’t attack us, they attack the Ukrainians. Headquarters is functioning and not a single person is out of a job. If they tell you that Wagner is in the way, that’s why something is falling in front, but That’s not why something fell down ahead,” Prigozhin added.

“A large area fell, and the number of dead soldiers was three to four times higher than in the delivery documents, and ten times higher than what was said on TV.”

Prigozhin said the scene took place at an army command center after Wagner opened fire on Russian armed forces and shot down three military helicopters.

As Wagner’s months-long dispute with the military reached a boiling point, Russian security services took his remarks with unprecedented seriousness. Russia’s main security service, the FSB, accused Prigozhin on Friday of organizing an armed uprising, while two senior generals who rarely speak in public urged Wagner’s fighters to stop what they called a “state coup”.

Prigozhin’s tactics appeared to mark the breakdown of the hybrid system in which a patchwork of competing security forces fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine, often for conflicting purposes. Months of open infighting between Wagner and the military have sparked chaos as Russia’s plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine continue to stall.

In Rostov, home to the main command center overseeing President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, officials urged people to stay home and avoid the city center. Masked men set up positions outside the military headquarters in southern Russia and several other security service buildings, according to multiple videos posted on local website 161.ru and local social media.

It was unclear whether all of them were Wagner fighters or part of Russia’s regular armed forces, though photos on state news agency TASS suggested some were members of paramilitary groups.

Rostov Governor Vasily Golibev wrote on social media that public transport routes would be changed “due to the current situation,” without explaining why.

Outside Rostov, there was little sign of Prigozhin’s force numbering 25,000, nor of any clashes with Russian troops.

None of Prigozhin’s claims have been independently confirmed, and the video shows Wagner currently amassing such a force, and there is no indication that it ever exchanged fire with troops.

But a central Russian governor said a major highway north of Rostov to Moscow had been closed, while officials in the capital said an “anti-terror operation” was underway.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin was receiving regular updates on the situation and issued unspecified orders to his security services. As of 7 a.m. local time on Saturday, neither Putin nor any other senior Russian official had made any public comments on Prigorzhin’s apparent uprising.