In the most cutting passage of his remarks, Prigozhin said Wagner’s march to Moscow covered the same distance Russian troops could have covered to take Kyiv on the first day of the war in Ukraine, if only Russia’s army were as well-trained and well-led as Wagner’s mercenaries.

“We showed a master-class on how February 24, 2022, had to look. We turned around to avoid spilling the blood of Russian soldiers. We regret that we had to hit Russian aviation,” he said.

Prigozhin added that his ability to move troops and armor so quickly across Russia, with minimal resistance, revealed “serious security problems across the entire country.”

[Ahem. That essentially *was* the strategy employed by the Kremlin. They sent a column down roads from Belarus to Kyiv, only the Ukrainians actually showed up and opposed it. Remember that 40-km turkey shoot in the opening days of the war? Prigozhin apparently wants to humiliate Shoigu, but the real lesson here is that the Ukranians were smart enough to stage their defense forces wisely, and Putin and Shoigu don’t have any real defensive forces at all at the moment. — Ed]