Agitate US? Wagner Wanted To Seize Russia’s Nukes During Vladimir Putin Mutiny
When Wagner group rebelled against Russian president Vladimir Putin on June 24, mercenaries drove north toward Moscow but a contingent diverted towards a fortified Russian army base that holds nuclear weapons, news agency Reuters reported even though Western officials have repeatedly said that Russia’s nuclear stockpile was never in danger during the brief rebellion.
Ukraine’s head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov told Reuters that the Wagner fighters went far further as they reached the nuclear base and their intention was to acquire small Soviet-era nuclear devices in order to “raise the stakes”.
“Because if you are prepared to fight until the last man standing, this is one of the facilities that significantly raises the stakes,” Kyrylo Budanov said. The only barrier were the doors to the nuclear storage facility as they “were closed and they didn’t get into the technical section,” he said.
A Wagner contingent “managed to get into a zone of special interest, as a result of which the Americans got agitated because nuclear munitions are stored there,” a source close to the Kremlin with military ties told Reuters while another said that this caused concern in the Kremlin, prompting Russia to hastily negotiate with the Wagner group in a deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko.
What has US said about this account?
White House national security council spokesman Adam Hodge said, “We are not able to corroborate this report. We had no indication at any point that nuclear weapons or materials were at risk.”
Matt Korda, a senior research associate and project manager for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said it would be “virtually impossible for a non-state actor” to breach Russian nuclear security.
“If you had a malicious actor who was able to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they would find the weapons stored in a state of incomplete assembly. They would need to be completed by installing specialised equipment and then unlocking permissive action links, and in order to do that they would need the cooperation of someone from the 12th Directorate” responsible for protecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he said.
Did the Russian military support Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, said that many in the Russian military sided with Yevgeny Prigozhin. “There are so many commanders who sympathise with Wagner and don’t want to follow Putin,” he said. At least14 Russian generals supported Prigozhin, he asserted.