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By Isabel van Brugen
News Reporter
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Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Tuesday that the "special military operation" Russia launched against Ukraine hasn't achieved the results that the Kremlin expected and that Ukraine now has one of the world's most powerful armies.
Prigozhin, whose fighters have been heavily involved in the war in Ukraine, shared a 77-minute interview with pro-Moscow blogger Konstantin Dolgov, in which he launched one of his most heated attacks on Russia's military leadership since the war began.
Relations between the Wagner Group head and the Kremlin have become increasingly strained as the war has gone on. He has repeatedly accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov of depriving his fighters of the ammunition they need for the war, even going as far as to suggest that doing so amounts to treason.
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Russia sought to "demilitarize" Ukraine, but has instead militarized it with some of the best weapons in the world, Prigozhin said, echoing the justifications Russian President Vladimir Putin gave when launching his full-scale invasion against the neighboring country on February 24, 2022.
"The special military operation was done for the sake of denazification and demilitarization. Thus, the denazification of Ukraine, which we talked about, we made Ukraine a nation that is known to everyone all over the world...Ukraine has become a country that is known absolutely everywhere."
"Now, with regard to demilitarization...if they had 500 tanks at the beginning of the special operation, [now] they have 5,000 tanks. If they had 20,000 people able to fight skillfully, now 400,000 people know how to fight. How did we demilitarize it? It turns out that the opposite is true—we militarized her hell knows how," the Wagner chief said.
Ukraine has received a trove of weapons and military equipment from its Western allies to assist in its fight against Russia, including MiG-29 fighter jets, anti-aircraft systems, tactical drones, rocket systems, howitzers and artillery rounds.
Ukraine now has "one of the strongest armies," Prigozhin continued.
"They have a high level of organization, a high level of training, a high level of intelligence, they have various weapons, and moreover, they work on any systems, Soviet, NATO, anything, equally successfully."
He also described Wagner Group as being "in first place in the world" in terms of efficiency.
In the same interview, Prigozhin demanded the resignations of Shoigu and Gerasimov, and suggested they should be replaced by Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev and with Gen. Sergei Surovikin, both of whom he has previously praised.
Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry for comment via email.
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