Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has accused the Russian military of striking his camps and killing a “huge amount” of his private force.

In an angry video tirade, the outspoken Putin ally said the Russian army had “launched strikes on our camps”.

“A huge amount of our fighters were killed, our comrades in arms. We will make a decision about how to respond to these atrocities. The next step is ours.”

He also vowed to stop the “evil” of the Russian military leadership, accusing them of lying about the need to launch a war on Ukraine.

“Those who destroyed our lads, who destroyed the lives of many tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, will be punished,” he said.

Mr Prigozhin, who is dubbed Putin’s chef for his connections to the Russian president, posted the furious audio on his official Telegram channel.

Russia’s defence ministry quickly issued a statement saying Mr Prigozhin’s accusations “do not correspond to reality and are an informational provocation”.

Mr Prigozhin said the Kremlin’s rationale for invading Ukraine was based on lies concocted by the army’s top brass.

For months he has been openly accusing Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, of rank incompetence.

But for the first time he has dismissed Russia’s core justifications for invading Ukraine on February 24 last year in what it calls a “special military operation”.

“There was nothing out of the ordinary happening on February 24 … the Defence Ministry is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO,” Mr Prigozhin said, calling the official version “a beautiful story”.

“The war was needed… so that Shoigu could become a marshal… so that he could get a second ‘Hero’ (of Russia) medal. The war wasn’t needed to demilitarise or denazify Ukraine.”

Sitting on a chair with a giant black Wagner flag behind him, Mr Prigozhin said the war had also been needed to enrich the ruling elite who, he said, were not satisfied with the commercial potential of part of Ukraine’s

Donbas region that Russia seized control of in 2014 via a proxy separatist force.

“The task was to divide material assets (in Ukraine),” he said.

“There was massive theft in the Donbas but they wanted more.”