The feud between Russia’s government and Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the outspoken mercenary tycoon, escalated sharply on Friday, as Mr. Prigozhin accused the military of attacking his forces, vowed to retaliate and declared on social media that Russia’s “evil” military leadership “must be stopped.” Russian law enforcement immediately accused him of fomenting an “armed rebellion.”
There was no immediate sign the conflict between the mercenary leader and military leaders would ignite armed clashes on the ground in Russia, but the fast-moving developments late Friday evening represented the most dramatic internal conflict inside the country to spill into the open since President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began 16 months ago.
“The evil carried by the country’s military leadership must be stopped,” Mr. Prigozhin said in one of a series of voice recordings posted to the Telegram social network after 9 p.m. Moscow time.
Minutes later, he suggested that his Wagner mercenary force was prepared to go on the offensive against Russia’s own Defense Ministry, saying, “There’s 25,000 of us, and we are going to figure out why chaos is happening in the country.”
Russia’s Anti-Terrorism Committee, a law enforcement body, quickly issued a statement asserting that “the allegations spread on behalf of Yevgeny Prigozhin have no basis.”
“In connection with these statements, the F.S.B. of Russia initiated a criminal case on suspicion of calling for an armed rebellion,” the committee said, referring to the initials for Russia’s domestic intelligence agency. “We demand an immediate stop to these unlawful actions.”
Mr. Prigozhin has attacked the Defense Ministry for months, asserting that Russia’s top brass have refused to provide Wagner forces with needed ammunition even as they fought alongside the Russian military for control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. But on Friday, he took his accusations to a new level, claiming that the Russian military had attacked Wagner encampments, killing “a huge number of fighters.”
In a 30-minute video released earlier in the day, Mr. Prigozhin had described his country’s invasion of Ukraine as a “racket” perpetrated by a corrupt elite chasing money and glory without concern for Russian lives.
For months the Russian war effort has been hampered by the bitter feud between Mr. Prigozhin and top military leaders, whom he has accused in scathing terms of incompetence in conducting the war.
But the accusations Mr. Prigozhin leveled in audio and videotaped messages posted on Friday raised the stakes. Never before had Mr. Prigozhin accused Russia’s military leaders of attacking his forces, nor had asserted in such stark terms that the Kremlin’s stated justification for the war was nonsense.
He accused the Russian minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, of orchestrating a deadly attack with missiles and helicopters on camps to the rear of the Russian lines in Ukraine, where his soldiers of fortune were bivouacked. And he accused Mr. Shoigu of overseeing the strikes himself from the town of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, near Ukraine.
The mercenary leader’s claims could not be immediately verified. The Russian defense ministry denied the allegations, saying in a statement that the messages Mr. Prigozhin had posted about supposed strikes on Wagner camps “do not correspond to reality.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that Mr. Putin was “aware of all events around Prigozhin,” according to Interfax, a Russian news agency.
Mr. Prigozhin’s accusations created a ripple effect among Russian pro-war activists, who fear that an open conflict between the army and Wagner forces could threaten the Russian front lines during the Ukrainian counteroffensive. In Ukraine, some viewed his statements as more evidence of internal divisions within the Russian war effort.
In an earlier videotaped speech, Mr. Prigozhin did not explicitly impugn Mr. Putin, instead casting him as a leader being misled by his officials. But in dismissing the Kremlin’s narrative that the invasion was an existential necessity for the Russian nation, Mr. Prigozhin went farther than anyone in Russia’s security establishment in publicly challenging the wisdom of the war.
“The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” Mr. Prigozhin said, referring to Mr. Putin’s initial justifications for the war. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”
Friday’s diatribes deepened the enigma of Mr. Prigozhin’s ambiguous role in Mr. Putin’s system. His Wagner troops, composed of veteran fighters as well as thousands of convicts whom Mr. Prigozhin personally recruited from Russian prisons, proved key in capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in May after a monthslong battle.
But, during the battle for Bakhmut, Mr. Prigozhin also emerged as a populist political figure, excoriating Russia’s military leadership for corruption and for not providing his forces with enough ammunition. His angry recordings and videos posted to the Telegram messaging network cast top military and Kremlin officials as unaware and uncaring of the struggles of regular Russian soldiers.
So far, Mr. Putin has not reined in Mr. Prigozhin, even as his security forces have jailed or fined thousands of Russians for criticizing the military or opposing the war. Some people who know Mr. Putin have said they believe that he still sees Mr. Prigozhin as a loyal servant applying needed pressure on a sprawling military apparatus. Others theorize that the Kremlin has orchestrated Mr. Prigozhin’s tirades against Mr. Shoigu, the defense minister, to deflect blame from Mr. Putin himself.
But Friday’s statements complicated the picture, with Mr. Prigozhin going after not just Mr. Shoigu but also unnamed “oligarchs” around Mr. Putin, while casting the entire official rhetoric around the invasion as a sham. He said there was “nothing out of the ordinary” in Ukraine’s military posture on the eve of the February 2022 invasion — challenging the Kremlin’s justification that Ukraine was on the verge of attacking Russian-backed separatist territory in Ukraine’s east.
“Our holy war with those who offend the Russian people, with those who are trying to humiliate them, has turned into a racket,” he said.
The comments come as Russia fights to hold back Ukraine’s counteroffensive — a fight that Mr. Prigozhin asserted in his video was going much more poorly for Russia than the government was letting on. On Telegram, pro-war commentators quickly pushed back against that assertion, including Igor Girkin, a former paramilitary commander who himself has often criticized Russia’s top brass.
“Prigozhin already should have been handed over to a military tribunal for many things,” Mr. Girkin wrote. “Now also for treason.”
