Russian Wagner boss sees traitors in the Kremlin and demands YouTube ban
- Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin took aim at the Kremlin administration for failing to block YouTube
- The increasingly prominent Russian businessman has been a close ally of President Vladimir Putin
The head of Russian paramilitary organisation Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has accused staff from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s entourage of treason.
They were pretending to be on Putin’s side, but were in fact disrupting the course of the war and waiting for a quick end so that they could pander to the US in the event of Russia’s defeat, Prigozhin claimed in a statement posted on his Telegram channel on Wednesday.
The businessman, whose troops are fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine, said Moscow would soon comply with his demands to block the YouTube video platform.
“YouTube is an information plague of our time,” Prigozhin said.
So far, the service has not been blocked in Russia – unlike Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, for example – “because there is a large number of people working in the presidential administration who think of only one thing – that Russia should lose the war as soon as possible”.
These people are the “traitors to their people and their country”, and “Wagner’s sledgehammer” awaits them in the future, Prigozhin said.