Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner group, has called for a coup against Russia’s military leaders, saying he had 25,000 fighters ready to “end this mess.”

Russian soldiers across the country were put on high alert on Friday night after Prigozhin urged citizens to stay inside and threatened to march on the Kremlin.

The Wagner group chief issued the call after accusing Russian generals of carrying out on airstrike on his fighters in Ukraine. He said “huge number” had been killed but provided no evidence.

In an audio message late on Friday night, Prigozhin said his troops are entering Rostov.

“We crossed the state border in all places,” Prigozhin said. “The border guards came out to meet and hugged our fighters.

“We are entering Rostov. We don’t fight children. Shoigu kills children. He put 18-year-old boys against us. These guys will live and go back to their mothers. But we will destroy everything that gets in the way.”

The FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, said that it had opened a criminal case against Prigozhin, once considered one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted fixers, and declared him to be a “foreign agent”.

The case accuses Prigozhin of launching an “armed rebellion inside Russia”. The FSB added: “This is punishable with between 12 and 20 years in prison.”

It also called on Wagner group members to ignore Prighozin and arrest him if they could.

In his Telegram audio message calling for an overthrow of Russian military leaders, Prighozin said: “The commanders’ council of the Wagner Private Military Company has reached a decision.

“The evil that the country’s military leadership perpetuates must be stopped.

“I ask you not to resist. Anyone who does will be considered a threat and destroyed. That goes for any checkpoints and aviation on our way.”

“Presidential power, the government, the police and Russian guard will work as usual.

“This is not a military coup, but a march of justice. Our actions do not interfere with the troops in any way.”

“There are 25,000 of us and we are going to figure out what this chaos is happening in the country,” he said in a later update. “Anyone who wants to join can. We need to end this mess.”

In the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said that the Russian leader was aware of “the situation around Prigozhin”.

Later reports said that Putin’s motorcade was seen speeding through Moscow to the Kremlin from his residence in the suburbs of the capital.

General Sergei Surovikin, the deputy head of the armed forces in Ukraine, called on Mr Prigohzin to ‘stop the convoys and return them to their bases.”

“Together we have been on a difficult path,” Gen Surovikin said. “We fought together, took risks, suffered losses and won together. We are the same blood. We are warriors. I urge you to stop.

“The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation in our country to deteriorate. You can’t play into the hands of the enemy in these difficult times for our country.”

News reports also said that an emergency plan called “krepost”, or fortress, had deployed Russian soldiers around the capital and to strategic locations.

While Mr Prighozin was careful to say he was not launching a coup against president Putin, without control of the armed forces the Russian leader would be profoundly weakened and at risk of being deposed.

In Rostov, a large city in the south of Russia that the Russian top military command have been using as their base, armoured personnel carriers were seen guarding street corners.

Prigozhin is a fierce critic of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s Defence Minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the military.

He said that he wanted to avenge the ordinary Russian soldiers who have been killed by incompetent leadership since the start of the invasion of Ukraine last February.

Russia has lost an estimated 220,000 men in the war.

Prigozhin has been highly visible in Russia’s regions over the past few weeks since withdrawing from the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine where his forces captured the town of Bakhmut.

He has given a series of talks about the war, focusing on his criticism of Mr Shoigu.

And on Friday evening, he accused Mr Shoigu of ordering the Russian military to shell a Wagner camp and published a video of what he said was the remains of the destroyed camp.

In a statement, the Russian Ministry of Defence denied this.

“All the messages and video frames distributed on social networks on behalf of Prigozhin about the alleged strike by the Russian Ministry of Defence on the rear camps of Wagner do not correspond to reality,” it said.

War in Ukraine ‘based on lies’

Earlier on Friday Prigozhin claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was based on lies that the country was a threat to Moscow and its citizens.

In an explosive video, he dismantled the case Vladimir Putin has offered for the war that has killed or wounded more than 220,000 Russian soldiers.

While the outspoken Wagner commander has often criticised the conduct of Russia’s defence ministry, he has not previously attacked the central planks of Moscow’s propaganda.

“The Ministry of Defence deceived the president and the public, telling them that there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they were going to attack us with the entire Nato bloc,” Prigohzin said.

The Wagner founder claimed instead that the war was motivated by the personal ambition of his longtime foe Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, and the avarice of Russian oligarchs.

“The war was needed by Shoigu to become a Marshal not in order to return Russian citizens to our bosoms and not in order to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine,” he said.

“The oligarchs needed the war. This is the clan that manages Russia today. And the second part of the operation was to install Medvedchuk as Ukraine’s president,” he said in a reference to Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russia oligarch who is also a close friend of Putin.

Prigohzin, despite his repeated broadsides at the defence ministry, has refrained from criticising the Russian president, often instead portraying him as misled by his underlings.

Yet his latest assertion directly contradicts the rationale for the war proclaimed by Putin, who said when sending his tanks into Ukraine that it was to demilitarise and “denazify” a country that posed a threat to Russia.

It is a narrative that Russian authorities defend with fines or prison terms for those deemed to have spread “falsehoods” about the war.

There was no response to those claims from the Defence Ministry, which has ignored previous complaints from Prigozhin, in public at least. Nor was there any immediate reaction from the Kremlin, which has also declined in the past to comment on Prigozhin’s outbursts.

Putin has, however, backed a Defence Ministry order, which Prigozhin opposes, that mercenary groups like Wagner must sign contracts putting themselves under ministry control by July 1.

On Thursday, Prigozhin had accused the top brass of lying to Putin and the Russian people about the scale of Russian losses and setbacks in Ukraine.

In Friday’s video, he said Moscow could have struck a deal with Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, before the war, that the conflict had been a disaster for Russia, and that tens of thousands of young lives had been sacrificed needlessly, including members of Russia’s most capable forces.

Portraying the top brass as vodka- and cognac-swilling fools who lunch on caviar, he alleged the Russian war effort was being hobbled by corruption.

“We are bathing in our own blood,” he said. “Time is running out fast.”

Igor Girkin, a staunchly pro-war nationalist blogger who is accused of committing war crimes in Donbas in 2014, called Prigozhin an enemy of Russia after watching the interview.

“Prigozhin should have been brought to a military tribunal for a lot of things. Now also for betrayal,” he said.