Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian mercenary company that fought in Bakhmut, says he’s not buying Moscow’s claims that it inflicted heavy losses on Ukrainian troops in Donetsk.
Russia’s defense ministry on Tuesday said it had quashed a major offensive by Ukraine, wiping out 1,500 enemy soldiers, 109 armored vehicles, and 28 tanks — including eight Leopard tanks provided by Germany and three AMX-10 reconnaisance vehicles from France.
But in a Monday statement from his press service, Prigozhin dismissed the Kremlin’s tally as “wild and absurd science fiction.”
To kill 1,500 soldiers, Russia would have to advance 93 miles every day, said the Wagner Group boss.
“Therefore, I believe that this is simply wild and absurd science fiction,” said Prigozhin.
The numbers given by the defense ministry’s spokesperson would mean that Russia’s army would have “just destroyed the entire planet Earth five times over” and “reached the aliens,” he added.
Prigozhin, who was on the ground for months with his troops in a region devastated by war, didn’t give detail on how he drew these conclusions.
His latest criticisms of the Kremlin have only intensified the animosity that already exists between him and the top military officials in Moscow.
The Wagner leader recently attacked Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, saying in May that Shoigu ‘s children and the Russian elite lived in luxury while ordinary citizens were dying in Ukraine.
Earlier that month, he screamed insults and curses at Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, the Russian army’s chief of the general staff, in an expletive-filled video where he raged about ammo shortages and heavy casualties.
On Friday, he accused the Kremlin of leaving landmines in the way of his withdrawing troops, and questioned why they were placed in their way. Prigozhin stated that the fact the mines were so far behind the Ukrainian troops meant they couldn’t have been placed by Ukraine or laid to destroy Ukrainian forces.
In an interview Prigozhin released on Monday, in which he invited the Kremlin’s leaders to travel to the conflict zone and stand with the troops.
Ukraine’s and Russia’s Defense Ministries did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.
The post Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who spent months on the ground in Bakhmut, said the Kremlin’s claims about inflicting heavy losses on Ukraine are ‘wild and absurd science fiction’ appeared first on Business Insider.
