‘Send the scumbags to the front barefoot’
The competition between the leadership of the PMC and the army had been known for a long time. But it was last autumn that the conflict came into the public view. Prigozhin, speaking about the need for personnel changes in the Defence Ministry, proposed methods of re-education of the failing generals: “All these scumbags should be sent to the front with machine guns and barefoot.”
At that, Prigozhin spoke flatteringly about Sergei Surovikin, the new commander of the united group of Russian troops, calling him a worthy man. Immediately a hypothesis was spread that Surovikin is a minion of Prigozhin and Kadyrov.
“According to my data, the real creators of the Wagner PMC were Russian special services generals,” says Vladimir Osechkin, human rights activist and founder of the Gulagu.net project. “In fact, initially, this company was an illegal division of the Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. Therefore, Vladimir Putin can be safely called the founding father of the shadow organization. Prigozhin was sent there to play the role of a supervisor or figurehead, through whom flows of ‘black’ funds have been withdrawn from the Russian budget under various state contracts.”