Global Courant
In a video posted early Saturday morning, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed to have seized power in Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian military district in Ukraine’s war effort.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed uprising against the Russian military leadership has immediately focused attention on Rostov-on-Don, a city of 1.1 million in southern Russia that for years has felt the repercussions of Russian military actions in the neighboring Ukraine.
As the headquarters of one of Russia’s five military districts, Rostov has played a key role in operations in Ukraine since 2014, when Russia unleashed a separatist war just across the border in the Donbas region.
Ukrainian soldiers place flowers on the coffin of comrade-in-arms Ilgar Mamedov during his funeral ceremony in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, Thursday, June 22, 2023. ..(Mauricio Lima/The New York Times)
The city’s importance as a military center has continued since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
“Rostov is a logistics hub for the entire Russian military effort in Ukraine, so it is heavily guarded.
The upper chain of command is in Rostov,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence services and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
A soldier sits on top of an armored vehicle from the Wagner Group military company, while guarding an area at the Southern Military District Headquarters on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023. (AP Photo)
The fact that Prigozhin and his troops were able to occupy Rostov is not only symbolic from a military and strategic point of view, but also significant for Russia’s ability to wage its war in Ukraine, he added.
In the first messages when the uprising began, Prigozhin suggested that Russia’s defense minister had been in Rostov, claiming without evidence that the senior official had personally gone to the Southern Military District headquarters to oversee a Russian attack on the group’s position. Wagner military in Ukraine.
In a video posted on Prigozhin’s Telegram channel, he was seen laughing with Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and the deputy head of Russian military intelligence, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev.
“Alekseyev is in charge of all intelligence activities in Ukraine,” Soldatov said, stressing the significance of the fact that the two men had been “effectively taken hostage by Prigozhin’s people.”
Close to the Azov Sea, next to Ukraine’s southeastern border, Rostov has also been at the receiving end of migration flows from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014, making the situation in Ukraine more relevant there than in many other parts of Russia.
Much of the Rostov region is focused on agriculture, with a giant tractor-shaped Soviet-era Constructivist theater in the center of the main city.
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