The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force has again criticized Russia’s military and political elite after a drone attack in Moscow that injured two people, damaged property and left some angry that the Kremlin did not particularly protect the capital city.
In an expletive-drenched statement posted on Telegram through its press service on Tuesday, Yevgeny Prigozhin – whose mercenary fighters played a key role in the war in Ukraine – blamed the drone attack on out-of -touch officials who live in the wealthy suburbs of Moscow. Rublyovka.
“You, the Defense Ministry, did nothing to launch an offensive,” Prigozhin said in the statement.
“How do you allow drones to reach Moscow?”
“And what do ordinary people do when drones with explosives fall through their windows?”
Directing his anger at the powerful residents of the upscale area of Rublyovka in Moscow’s western suburbs, Prigozhin spoke of “scum” and “swine” who sit quietly while Moscow is under attack.
In a Telegram post after Tuesday’s attack, Alexander Khinshtein, a prominent member of the Russian parliament from the ruling United Russia bloc, said three of the eight drones were downed in three villages in Rublyovka , one of which is located just 10 minutes away. from the residence of President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Novo-Ogaryovo.
Rublyovka, a patchwork of elite gated communities in the forest west of Moscow, which once boasted some of the highest real-estate prices in the world, is home to most of the political elite, Russian business and culture. Former President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin reportedly own homes in Rublyovka, along with many of Russia’s richest businessmen.
Wagner’s boss Prigozhin, known for his blunt and often blunt speech, repeatedly dismissed Rublyovka’s residents as an out-of-touch elite insufficiently committed to the war in Ukraine and blamed the top brass of Russia’s failures on the battlefield.
Russian military blogger Igor Girkin – who was found by a Dutch court guilty of killing 298 people who died when flight MH17 was shot down over Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine in 2014 – also criticized the residents of Rublyovka on Tuesday who, he said, “have never. thought about the country”.
He also criticized Putin for continuing to declare that the war in Ukraine is a “special military operation”, despite the drone attacks on the Russian capital, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) WRITES on Wednesday.
After the drone attacks, Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of the Russian province of Chechnya, urged the Kremlin to declare martial law throughout the country and use all its resources in Ukraine “to eradicate that terrorist gang”.
ISW, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said Kadyrov had also warned European countries about supplying Ukraine with weapons, saying “if they continue to give Ukraine weapons, they don’t have the weapons needed to defend themselves if Russia ‘knocks on their doors’”.
Some Kremlin observers noted that Putin’s calm reaction to the drone attack contrasted sharply with angry statements from Russia hawks and reflected his belief that the Russian public would not be disturbed by the attack.
Putin said it was clear that Moscow’s air defenses needed to be improved against what he described as “terrorism” in Ukraine.
Legitimate defense
Russia’s ambassador to the United States said on Wednesday that Washington encouraged Kyiv to carry out such attacks by not speaking out against Moscow’s drone raid.
The White House said it did not support the attacks inside Russia and that it was still gathering information on the incident.
“What are these attempts to hide behind the phrase that they are ‘gathering information’?” Russia’s ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said in statements published on the Telegram messaging channel.
“This is an encouragement for terrorists in Ukraine,” he said.
Although not commenting specifically on the drone attacks in Moscow, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly of the United Kingdom said on Tuesday that Ukraine has the right to attack targets on Russian territory for the purpose of self-defense.
“Ukraine has a legitimate right to defend itself,” Cleverly said during a press conference with his Estonian counterpart Margus Tsahkna in Estonia’s capital Tallinn.
“It has the legitimate right to do so within its own borders, of course, but it also has the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force in Ukraine itself,” he said. he. “So the legitimate military targets beyond its own borders are about Ukraine’s self-defense. And we have to recognize that,” he added.
Ukrainian forces attacked a Russian town near the border for the third time in a week on Wednesday, damaging buildings and burning vehicles, the region’s governor said on Wednesday.
At least one person was injured during the artillery strike in Shebekino, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
A Ukrainian drone also caused a fire at the Afipsky oil refinery in southern Russia on Wednesday, the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region said.
The fire was soon extinguished and there were no casualties, Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on the Telegram messaging app. The Afipsky refinery is not far from the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, near another refinery that has been attacked several times this month.
