Prigozhin Forecasts Disaster if Russia Does Not Move Into Total War Footing

Mr. Prigozhin said that Wagner’s forces alone had lost 20,000 soldiers during the war in Ukraine, half of them from prisons. These convict fighters constitute 20 percent of the total number of incarcerated convicts who join the combat forces.

A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said the United States considered Mr. Prigozhin’s numbers a significant loss. Even so, it is higher than the losses of the Russian Armed Forces that the Kremlin admits. While the American estimate is higher, the Russian government has only acknowledged the death of 6,000 soldiers – the last statistic made public in September.

Mr Prigozhin’s comments in the interview followed an attack on Russia’s Belgorod region by militants aligned with Ukraine. The fighters, ethnic Russians seeking victory in Ukraine, apparently used US-made armored vehicles, sparking the fiercest fighting in Russia since the war began 15 months ago.

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

In brief comments during a meeting with friends on Wednesday, Mr. Shoigu did not react to Mr. Prigozhin’s comments and maintained that Russia would “respond quickly and very violently” to another attack by “Ukrainian militants.”

Many analysts and other observers were surprised by Mr. Prigozhin’s regular diatribes against the Russian elite in a strictly controlled society, and especially the criticism aimed at Mr. Shoigu.

“He is playing a very dangerous game,” one wealthy businessman in Moscow said of Mr. Prigozhin in an interview with The New York Times in late March, requesting anonymity to discuss individuals with ties to the Kremlin. “If he doesn’t stop, he will be like Aleksei Navalny.” Mr Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, is now unwell in a penal colony.