president Wladimir Putin‘s loyal ally and Russian mercenary boss reacted to media reports that drew comparisons between him and the legendary monk Grigory Rasputin.

What happened: Wagner group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Sunday his job is not to stop bleeding, but to stop it shed the blood of Russia’s enemies.

This came after the Financial Times newspaper reported on it Prigozhin had a growing influence on Putin and compared him to Rasputin, a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed saint who had considerable influence on the wife of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II.

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Rasputin treated the last tsar’s son for hemophilia.

“I’m not very familiar with the story of Rasputin, but as far as I know, an important quality of Rasputin is that he used incantations to stop the blood flow of the young prince,” Prigozhin’s press service quoted him as saying, according to Reuters.

“Unfortunately, I don’t staunch the flow of blood. I bleed the enemies of our motherland. And not through incantations, but through direct contact with them,” he added.

Prigozhin is the founder of the private military group Wagner, which played an important role in Putin’s attempts to seize territory in Ukraine.

In the meantime, Vyacheslav VolodinSpeaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament warned against it US and NATO support for Ukraine is leading the world into a ‘terrible war’.

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photo above government.ru on Wikimedia Commons