The owner of the Wagner private military contractor escalated his direct challenge to the Kremlin on Friday, calling for an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defence minister. The security services reacted immediately by opening a criminal investigation into Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Prigozhin posted a series of angry video and audio recordings in which he accused Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering a rocket strike Friday on Wagner’s field camps in Ukraine, where his troops are fighting on behalf of Russia.

Prigozhin said his troops would now punish Shoigu in an armed rebellion and urged the army not to offer resistance.

“This is not a military coup, but a march of justice,” Prigozhin declared.

The National Anti-Terrorism Committee, which is part of the Federal Security Services, said he would be investigated on charges of calling for an armed rebellion. The state news agency Tass said President Vladimir Putin was kept informed.

Wagner’s forces have played a crucial role in Russia’s war in Ukraine, succeeding in taking the city where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place, Bakhmut. Prigozhin has frequently criticized Russia’s military brass, accusing it of incompetence and of starving his troops of weapons and ammunition, but his accusations and calls for armed rebellion Friday were a more direct challenge.

The Russian Defence Ministry required all military contractors to sign contracts with it before July 1, but Prigozhin, whose feud with the Defence Ministry dates back years, refused to comply.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Photo / AP

In a statement issued late Friday, he said he was ready to find a compromise with the Defence Ministry, but “they have treacherously cheated us.”

“Today they carried out a rocket strike on our rear camps, and a huge number of our comrades got killed,” he said.

Prigozhin claimed that Shoigu went to the Russian military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don personally to direct the strike on Wagner and then “cowardly” fled.

“This scum will be stopped,” he said, in a reference to Shoigu.

“The evil embodied by the country’s military leadership must be stopped,” he shouted, urging the army not to offer any resistance to Wagner as it moves to “restore justice.”

In other developments in the Ukraine, war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on other countries to heed warnings that Russia may be planning to attack an occupied nuclear power plant to cause a radiation disaster.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group military company speaks holding a Russian national flag in front of his soldiers in Bakhmut, Ukraine. Photo / AP

Members of his government briefed international representatives on the possible threat to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose six reactors have been shut down for months. Zelenskyy said that he expected other nations to “give appropriate signals and exert pressure” on Moscow.

“Our principle is simple: The world must know what the occupier is preparing. Everyone who knows must act,” Zelenskyy said late on Thursday. “The world has enough power to prevent any radiation incidents, let alone a radiation catastrophe.”

The Kremlin’s spokesman has denied the threat to the plant is coming from Russian forces.

The potential for a life-threatening release of radiation has been a concern since Russian troops invaded Ukraine last year and seized the plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station. The head of the UN’s atomic energy agency spent months trying to negotiate the establishment of a safety perimeter to protect the facility as nearby areas came under repeated shelling, but he has been unsuccessful.

The International Atomic Energy Agency noted on Thursday that “the military situation has become increasingly tense” while a Ukrainian counteroffensive that got underway this month unfolds in Zaporizhzhia province, where the namesake plant is located, and in an adjacent part of Donetsk province.

Although the last of the plant’s six reactors was shut down last fall to reduce the risk of a meltdown, experts have warned that a radiation release could still happen if the system that keeps the reactors’ cores and spent nuclear fuel cool loses power or water.

During months of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have traded blame over which side was increasing the threat to the plant. On Friday, IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi met with the head of the Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom in the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia to discuss the conditions at the plant. Rosatom director Alexey Likachev and other officials “emphasized that they now expect specific steps” from the UN agency to prevent Ukrainian attacks on the plant and its adjacent territory, said a statement from the Russian corporation, whose divisions build and operate nuclear power plants.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of mining the plant’s cooling system, already under threat from a dam collapse earlier this week that drew down water in a reservoir that the power station uses.

Elsewhere in the southern Zaporizhzhia province, Gov. Yuriy Malashko reported on Friday that Russian shelling killed two people in the past day. And in the Kherson province, a Russian attack that hit a transportation company in the capital killed three people, Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said.

Russia also fired 13 cruise missiles overnight at a military airfield in the western Khmelnytskyi province, but Ukrainian air defences intercepted them all, according to the air force. The attack came after Russia-appointed officials said that Ukrainian-fired missiles damaged a bridge that serves as a key supply link to occupied areas of southern Ukraine. Photos showed that the Russians had erected a pontoon bridge as a bypass. Ukrainian authorities reported striking Russian soldiers holed up in a nearby former wine factory in Henichesk. Russia’s state news agency Tass reported two were killed in the attack.

Russia’s air-launched Kh-101 and Kh-555 missiles were sent from the Caspian Sea, the air force said. It didn’t identify the targeted airfield, but Ukraine has an air base near the Khmelnytskyi region’s town of Starokostiantyniv.

The base houses fighter jets and bombers, and five years ago hosted a training exercise with air force personnel from the United States, Ukraine and seven European countries. It has come under Russian attack previously, including within the last month.

Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said Friday that Russia has beefed up its defence forces in southern Ukraine in response to the early counteroffensive and intensified its efforts to take more ground in the east. Asked if the Ukrainian military’s initial attacks set the stage for a larger assault, Maliar told Ukrainian television: “We are yet to see the main events, and the main blow. And indeed, a part of reserves will be used later.”

Ukrainian forces so far have made only incremental gains in Zaporizhzhia province, one of four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year. Putin has pledged to defend the regions as Russian territory.

Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine is fighting to force Russian troops out of those regions, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 and is using as a staging and supply route in the 16-month-old war. If the counteroffensive breaks the Russian defences in the south, Ukrainian forces could attempt to reach a pair of occupied port cities on the Sea of Azov and break Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.

-SUSIE BLANN, Associated Press