Rebellion from Wagner paramilitary group one of major events in Russia in 2023 amid Ukraine war

By Anadolu Staff

The Wagner paramilitary group's rebellion against the Kremlin in June stood out as one of the major events that took place in Russia in 2023 amid the war with Ukraine.

In a challenge against Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, who accused the Russian military of attacking its fighters, crossed from Ukraine into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and began a “March of Justice” toward Moscow on June 23.

The Russian Defense Ministry denied the claim, calling it an "informational provocation," while Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) initiated a criminal case against Wagner for the "armed rebellion."

Russian President Vladimir Putin also labeled Wagner's uprising as an act of "treason."

Prigozhin said his fighters decided to turn back "to avoid bloodshed" when they were 200 kilometers (124 miles) from Moscow after a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and agreed to de-escalate the situation and relocate his forces to Belarus.

Just two months following the rebellion, Prigozhin, as well as Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, and five other names affiliated with the paramilitary group, died in a plane crash in the country's Tver region.

Although it was stated that the incident occurred as a result of a bomb explosion inside the plane, suspicions about whether the incident was sabotage or not were not clarified.

- Major events in Russia-Ukraine war in 2023

The Wagner Group was pivotal in Moscow’s capture of Bakhmut, a transport and logistics hub in the Donetsk region, which is part of the largely Russian-speaking industrialized Donbas region.

On May 20, the Russian Defense Ministry and the Wagner Group claimed their forces took complete control of the city, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied a day later.

During the clashes in Bakhmut, Prigozhin accused the Russian military and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu of not providing ammunition to his troops, a claim that sparked tensions between the two and later led to the Wagner rebellion in June.

On May 3, Russia claimed that Ukraine attempted to strike the Kremlin residence with two drones, which it said were shot down. Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials denied Kyiv’s involvement in the drone attack.

Starting in early June, the Ukrainian military launched large-scale counterattacks on its front line with Russia. Russian military officials and some Western countries said that the counterattacks were unsuccessful. The "failure" in question was attributed to the West's failure to fulfill its promise of ammunition and weapons.

On June 6, Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for blowing up the Kakhovka dam, located in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, following an explosion that flooded neighboring settlements, endangered crops, threatened water supplies and led to the evacuation of residents.

Moscow accused Ukraine of attempting to cut Crimea off from the freshwater it receives from the Kakhovka reservoir, while Kyiv claimed that Russia tried to slow an expected counteroffensive.

Over a month later, on July 17, Russia suspended its participation in the Black Sea grain deal, brokered by Türkiye and the UN, to resume grain exports from three Ukrainian Black Sea ports that were paused after the Ukraine war started in February 2022.

*Writing by Burc Eruygur