Feb 21 (Reuters) - Outspoken Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin accused the country's top brass on Tuesday of deliberately starving his Wagner fighters of munitions in what he said was a treasonous attempt to destroy his private military company.
A catering tycoon who has used his wealth to build a private army, Prigozhin has assumed a more public role since the start of the war in Ukraine a year ago, with his Wagner Group spearheading the battle for the town of Bakhmut in Ukraine's Donetsk region.
He has revelled in being sanctioned by the West, publicly insulted Russia's top military commanders, tried to parlay battlefield success into political influence, and detailed his recruitment of convicts for Wagner's ranks.
Prigozhin has also forged an informal alliance with fellow hardliners, including the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and accused the defence ministry of trying to take credit for Wagner successes in eastern Ukraine.
But his star appears to be waning. He was this year stripped of the right to recruit prisoners amid some signs of a Kremlin move to curb his influence.
On Tuesday, he appeared to publicly bridle against that pressure, losing his temper and shouting at one point.
"There is simply direct opposition going on (to attempts to equip Wagner fighters)," Prigozhin said in a voice message posted on his Telegram channel. "This can be equated to high treason.
"The chief of the general staff and the defence minister are giving orders right and left, not just not to give Wagner PMC (private military company) ammunition, but not to help it with air transport," Prigozhin alleged.
He said that senior officials had also declined Wagner's requests for special spades to dig trenches.
His voice rising to a shout, Prigozhin accused the military top brass of deciding that "people should die when it's convenient for them", and said that Wagner fighters were "dropping like flies" in the absence of necessary supplies.
There was no immediate response to his allegations from the Russian Defence Ministry, which has publicly ignored him in the past.
It was the second such message published by Prigozhin in two days. In an obscenity-peppered message on Monday, he complained that unnamed officials were denying Wagner supplies out of personal animosity to him, and that he was required to "apologise and obey" in order to rectify the situation.
The defence ministry has previously said that Wagner is not under its control even though the militia depends on the state for some arms and logistics.
Tatiana Stanovaya, head of the R.Politik political consultancy, said Prigozhin's outburst on Monday looked like "an act of desperation" aimed at "getting through to Putin".
It was not clear whether he had Prigozhin in mind, but Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, said he wanted an end to infighting.
"We must get rid of - I want to emphasise this - any interdepartmental contradictions, formalities, grudges, misunderstandings, and other nonsense," Putin told the political and military elite.
In a separate post, Prigozhin said later on Tuesday he had been too busy to watch Putin's speech and could therefore not comment on the president's remarks regarding the "special military operation".
