A Russian businessman and close ally of Vladimir Putin accused of financing the private military company Wagner Group by the US, the EU and others has said a dying-out western civilisation will be defeated by Russia.
The Guardian approached Yevgeny Prigozhin for his reaction to the evidence that Wagner fighters participated in massacres in Mali. He said he had repeatedly said that the Wagner Group does not exist and that he had nothing to do with it. "You are a dying western civilisation that considers Russians, Malians, Central Africans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and many other peoples and countries to be third world scum," he said. This is not true, you are a pathetic endangered bunch of perverts, and there are many of us, billions of us. Prigozhin said he was closely following the events taking place in Mali, where the collective west, namely the USA, Britain, France and other countries, have been planting and organizing terrorist groups in Mali for years. He said this was being done to keep the population in fear and to write off the money allocated for so-called peacekeeping operations. On Sunday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, acknowledged that Wagner was operating in Mali and Libya. Lavrov told an Italian television network that Wagner was present in the two African countries on a commercial basis, but reiterated Moscow s official position that Wagner has nothing to do with Russian state Western officials alleging that the Kremlin is using Wagner to advance Russian economic and political interests across Africa and elsewhere. After being identified in 2014, a group that is linked to human rights abuses in Syria and Ukraine has deployed fighters and advisers in more than a dozen countries, in addition to assisting pro-Russian separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Pirozghin said that the allegations that the Wagner Group and the Malian army were involved in massacres and other human rights abuses were false.
Any terrorist killed by the Malian army, the collective west attempted to pass off as a civilian As to the alleged atrocities neither I nor the men I know nor the Malian army have committed. The businessman also accused the French army of killing civilians and burying their remains not far from military bases. France sent troops to Mali in 2012 when Islamist and other insurgents formed a powerful alliance. In February Emmanuel Macron announced that troops were leaving after a breakdown in relations with the country's ruling junta.
Last month, the French military said Wagner mercenaries buried bodies near a Malian military base in order to falsely accuse France's departing forces of leaving behind mass graves. The French army said it used a drone to film what appeared to be white soldiers covering bodies with sand near the Gossi base in northern Mali.
Prigozhin, who earned the nickname Putin's cook after winning catering contracts for state banquets, was indicted in 2018 by the United States for financing an online operation to influence the 2016 United States elections. He has been accused of being involved in systematic efforts to influence opinion through false social media accounts in Africa, where Facebook has removed accounts believed to have been set up by Wagner operatives.
Prigozhin said that the Guardian had spread fakes, outright lies and falsification and tried to spit in the face of me, the Russian patriots and the Malian people. These atrocities are committed in your inflamed brain, which is infected with the disease Nazism.