Russian mercenary leader says his forces are starting to leave Bakhmut

He is further strengthened by his notorious mercenary forcerole in the recent capture of Bakhmut, Russia’s first battlefield victory in months. However, Russian state media has kept his name out of coverage of those events, showing how the Russian propaganda machine has been hiding power struggles between the elite and problems on the front lines of the Russian people.

In the interview, Mr Prigozhin called for all-out war – something Mr Putin has carefully avoided, trying to reassure his people that their lives will not be disrupted by the “special military operation” in Ukraine. That position is harder to maintain as the war continues and Russian losses mount.

The Kremlin, Mr Prigozhin said, must declare a new wave of mobilization to call up more fighters, declare martial law and force “everyone possible” to participate in the country’s munitions production efforts.

“We have to stop building new roads and infrastructure and work only for the war, to live in North Korea’s image for a few years,” he said. “If we win, we can build anything. We stabilize the front and then go into some kind of active action.”

The alternative, he said, is more violence, but perpetrated within Russia by ordinary people fed up with elites, whom Mr Prigozhin characterized as people who ignored the realities of war but did not do enough to win it.

“The children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show it on the Internet, the children of ordinary people come in zinc, torn to pieces,” he said, referring to the coffins of dead soldiers, adding that the fallen ” tens of thousands of relatives. “Society always demands justice, and when there is no justice, revolutionary feelings arise.”

Mr Prigozhin said his Wagner force alone had lost 20,000 men during the war in Ukraine, half of whom had been recruited from prisons. Those convicts represent 20 percent of the total number of captured convicts who have joined the force.

A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said the United States considered Mr Prigozhin’s number to be a significant underestimation of his losses. Still, it is significantly higher than the losses of the Russian forces that the Kremlin has acknowledged. While US estimates are significantly higher, the Russian government has only admitted the deaths of 6,000 soldiers – the latest statistics were shared publicly in September.

Mr Prigozhin’s comments in the interview came after a raid on the Russian region of Belgorod by Ukrainian-affiliated militants. The fighters, ethnic Russians seeking Ukraine’s victory, apparently used American-made armored vehiclesand led to the fiercest fighting on Russian soil since the start of the war 15 months ago.

Mr Prigozhin said Ukraine had “one of the strongest armies in the world” and added that the violence at the border reflected poor leadership at the highest level of the Russian military. He has often singled out Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu as the object of his anger, and in the interview, Mr. Prigozhin defined his personal creed as: “I love my motherland, I serve Putin, Shoigu must be judged and we will fight .” on.”

In brief remarks during a meeting with colleagues on Wednesday, Mr Shoigu offered no response to Mr Prigozhin’s remarks, insisting that Russia would “respond swiftly and extremely harshly” to further incursions by “Ukrainian militants”.

Many analysts and other observers marvel at Mr. Prigozhin’s regular tirades against the Russian elite in a tightly controlled society, and especially his pointed criticism of Mr. Shoigu.

“He is playing a very dangerous game,” a wealthy Moscow businessman said of Mr Prigozhin in an interview with The New York Times in late March, asking for anonymity to discuss a prominent Kremlin-linked person. “If he doesn’t quit, he’ll end up like Aleksei Navalny.” Mr Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, is now in poor health in a penal colony.

But Wagner’s recent victory at Bakhmut after a grueling months-long struggle, Prigozhin has been given political carte blanche, said Dmitri Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist and critic of the Kremlin.

“You get everything, permission to break the law, to take people out of prisons without asking anyone’s permission, to kill those people if you don’t like them because of discipline,” Oreshkin said of the terms of the deal between Mr. Putin and Mr. Prigozhin. “Had he not won this victory, he would have been ripped apart” by the elites he despised.

“It was a matter of life and death for him.”

Milan Mazeva reporting contributed.