Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of private military group Wagner, has vowed to retaliate after accusing Russia's military leadership of killing a "huge amount" of his forces in strikes -- a claim that defense officials quickly denied.
In Telegram post on Friday, Prigozhin -- who has frequently criticized Russia's traditional military hierarchy -- accused them of "trying to deprive us of the opportunity to defend our homes and instead hunt down Wagner PMC."
He said his forces were "ready to compromise with the Ministry of Defense to hand over our weapons and find a solution how we will continue to defend our country. But these scumbags did not calm down," adding that "they saw that we weren't broken and they launched strikes on our camps.'
"A huge amount of our fighters were killed, our comrades in arms. We will make a decision about how to respond to these atrocities. The next step is ours," he added.
He also warned of retribution. "So those who wiped out our guys today, they wiped out dozens. Many dozens, tens of thousands of lives, of Russian soldiers will be punished," Prigozhin continued.
"We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers and return to the front, justice for the troops will be restored, and then justice for all of Russia," he added.
Russia's Ministry of Defense denied striking a Wagner military camp and called it an "informational provocation" in a Telegram post on Friday.
"All the messages and videos (spread on) social networks on behalf of E. Prigozhin about the alleged 'strike of the Russian Ministry of Defense against the rear camps of the Wagner PMC' are untrue and are an informational provocation," the Russian MOD said.
Ukraine invaded under 'false pretenses'
Earlier on Friday, Prigozhin furthered his ongoing dispute with military leaders in a highly critical video interview where he said Moscow invaded Ukraine under false pretenses devised by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and that Russia is actually losing ground on the battlefield.
The Ukrainian invasion or the so-called "special operation," he says, was not launched because of a threat to Russia from Ukraine or NATO despite what Moscow claims, he said in the interview posted on Telegram by Wagner's media arm.
He added that the situation in eastern Ukraine had not changed in eight years from the time Crimea was annexed, with both sides taking the occasional shot at each other, without any escalation, he said.
His comments challenge Russia's justification for the war, with President Vladimir Putin having framed the invasion of Ukraine as a "special mission" to protect Russian speakers from genocide at the hands of "neo-Nazis."
Prigozhin has previously defended the reasoning for the war but has been critical of how it has been handled by the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu -- with whom he is directly fighting with over military contracts.
In the interview, he claimed the ministry misled Russian President Vladmir Putin entirely.
"Now the Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public, trying to deceive the President and tell the story that there was insane aggression on the part of Ukraine, and that they were going to attack us together with the NATO bloc. Therefore, the so-called special operation on February 24 was launched for completely different reasons," he said.
The Wagner chief also accused Shoigu of deceiving Putin about the status of the Ukrainian battlefield, claiming Russian troops are on the back foot in the south of Ukraine, and that the whole invasion was a "poorly planned operation."
Prigozhin and Wagner have played a prominent role in the Ukraine war. In May, he said his troops had captured Bakhmut in a costly and largely symbolic gain for Russia.
