Moscow’s elite society is in a panic, as a conversation between two oligarch “friends” of President Vladimir Putin was leaked in which they call him “devil” and “dwarf”.

The 67-year-old oligarch and former senator Farhad Akhmedov and the 53-year-old, music producer Joseph Prigozhin are accused of insulting the Russian president during an alleged 35-minute phone call.

The conversation was leaked by 5 Kanal and Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB.

In it the two men are heard discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, taking shots at the Russian president and the Kremlin for the failures of the “special military operation”.

Several Ukrainian and independent Russian media outlets – including Meduza – analyzed the audio of the conversation that allegedly took place on January 24. According to Meduza, Akhmedov is quoted as saying that the Russian government “[email protected], our children, their future,” referring to Putin’s war.

“He is Satan,” he adds, and then points his arrows at the former president of Russia and current vice-chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev: “Both he [ο Πούτιν] as well as the second [ο Μεντβέντεφ] they are notorious. Lilliputians and Tosodoulis”.

A significant part of the conversation was devoted to criticism of Putin and members of the Kremlin elite, who are using Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu as a scapegoat for failures on the Ukrainian fronts.

They call Shoigu “a fool, behind his back, of course,” Prigozhin reportedly said in the phone call. “They are the dumbest people. This is my opinion: they act like kings, like f@m gods. They are finished… I have nothing good to say about them. They’re scum, dammit,” he says. And Akhmedov adds: “They are cockroaches in a glass, already biting each other. They will destroy one, then devour each other, suffocate each other.”

Prigozhin initially claimed in a video message that the recording was a fake – suggesting it was the product of “neural networks” that “allow you to do miracles”. But he later admitted that at least some of the phases heard in the audio clip were authentic.

“The recording is a compilation of spoken phrases and others that were created and never spoken,” Prigozhin said in an apparently panic-stricken interview with St. Petersburg’s fontanka.ru, adding that he did not remember the conversation but that “this whole history is extremely unpleasant” for him.
An unnamed source at Russia’s FSB security service reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the audio clip and said “FSB leadership recently held a meeting and instructed subordinates to take action” on the scandal.

Billionaire Akhmedov was in the crosshairs of EU sanctions in April 2022 as a close ally of Putin and “a leading businessman active in sectors of the economy that provide a significant source of income to the government of the Russian Federation.”

The famous music producer Prigozhin has long been – publicly at least – among Putin’s supporters. “I’m shocked now and I don’t know how to live with this shit,” he said in an interview with Fontanka.ru, calling Putin a “planetary personality.”