Wagner Boss Prigozhin Announces Bid for Ukraine Presidency

This picture taken on July 4, 2017 shows Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin prior to a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow. The financier of the Wagner Group of mercenaries fighting for Moscow's interests in Ukraine made an outlandish announcement on March 11, 2023, that he intended to run for Ukrainian president. SERGEI ILNITSKY/GETTY IMAGES

The founder of the Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin said that in 2024 he intends to run for the presidency of Ukraine.

“I made a decision in 2024 to run for president — for the president of Ukraine,” Prigozhin said in an appeal published by the Wagner Orchestra Telegram channel.

He noted that he would compete with the incumbent President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and ex-president of the country Petro Poroshenko.

Prigozhin said that in 2024 he decided to go to the presidential elections in Ukraine

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the financier of the Wagner Group of mercenaries fighting for Russia, has made the outlandish claim that he intends to run for the presidency of Ukraine in 2024. It appeared to be a dig at the continued lack of ammunition his forces are enduring.

Dressed in combat gear and addressing the camera from an undisclosed location in which gunfire could be heard, he made a dramatic pause, before clarifying that he wanted to run for "president of Ukraine."

He said that if he defeated incumbent Volodomyr Zelensky and his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, "then everything will be fine" and that "ammunition will not be needed."

Wagner has been leading the offensive in Bakhmut, which has become the longest and bloodiest fight of Russia’s year-long assault.

According to him, the Wagner group needs some 10,000 tons of ammunition, worth approximately $1 billion, every month.

On human losses, Prigozhin said "fighters die at war in any case, the war is so invented that one army kills another."

In a separate statement, Prigozhin announced that Wagner recruitment centers have opened in 42 Russian cities.

"There are new fighters coming there who will go side by side with us to defend their country and their family. To make our common future and protect the memory of the past. Despite the colossal resistance of Ukraine's armed forces, we will go forward. Despite the sticks in the wheels that are stuck in ours at every move, we will overcome this together," Prigozhin said.

Last night a statement from him about the will to transform the "Wagner" into an army for the defense of the state and justice, had drawn attention to his now unlimited political ambitions. Precisely in an attempt to turn the fears of Russian political and military leaders into a joke, Prigozhin told Simonov: “I just got political ambitions, looking around me. I have decided that in 2024 I will run for the presidency… the presidency of Ukraine, and I will run for that post with (Volodymyr) Zelensky and (Petro) Poroshenko”: the current president of Ukraine and his immediate predecessor.