At the end of January of this year, the owner of the Russian PMC "Wagner" Yevhen Pryhozhyn allegedly offered the Ukrainian leadership data on the positions of Russian troops in exchange for the withdrawal of Ukrainian units from Bakhmut.
The Washington Post (WP) writes about this with reference to the leaked secret American documents, indicating that they were placed on Discord servers.
The newspaper writes that Pryhozhyn, against the background of the conflict with the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense, maintains relations with the Main Directorate of Intelligence (MDI) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. The documents say that in January, when his mercenaries in Bakhmut suffered heavy losses, Pryhozhyn went to the MDI with a proposal to give information about specific positions of the Russian military so that the Armed Forces of Ukraine could attack them. He proposed storming the regions in the south in order to reach the annexed Crimea. Pryhozhyn said that the Russian military faced a shortage of ammunition and had poor morale.
According to one of the documents, Pryhozhyn had phone conversations with the MDI officers and personally met with some in one of the African countries. Another document says that Kyiv guesses about the Kremlinʼs knowledge of MDIʼs contacts with Pryhozhyn.
Two Ukrainian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to the newspaper that Pryhozhyn had several conversations with Ukrainian intelligence. One official said that the businessman repeatedly came up with proposals for Bakhmut, but Kyiv rejected them due to distrust. One of the Ukrainian interlocutors of the newspaper characterized contacts with the founder of the PMC "Wagner" as an attempt to "keep friends close and enemies even closer."
Pryhozhyn himself has already reacted to the publication and confirmed contacts with the MDI, adding that "we are still in Africa with [the head of the MDI Kyrylo] Budanov."
- On April 13, The Washington published a transcript of an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, but later deleted a large fragment from it about the contacts of the MDI with the owner of PMC “Wagner” Yevhen Pryhozhyn. Zelensky asked journalists where they got such data from and which Ukrainians they talked to on this topic, since leaking such information is treason.