Global Courant 2023-05-05 14:44:55
The head of the mercenary group leading Russia’s struggling offensive in eastern Ukraine said on Friday his troops will pull out of the high-profile battle for Bakhmut due to a lack of military support.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sudden announcement marked the latest dramatic escalation in his feud with the Moscow military leadership. It followed a furious diatribe in which Prigozhin appeared to be surrounded by dead bodies as he blamed defense chiefs for the heavy casualties suffered by his Wagner Group fighters.
Hours after his expletive-laden diatribe, Prigozhin said he would hand over control of the grueling Bakhmut offensive to the Russian military on May 10 due to a shortage of ammunition supplies.
“I am withdrawing PMC Wagner’s units from Bakhmut because for want of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” he said, adding that his troops would retreat to camps to “lick our wounds”.
Visibly angry, Prigozhin said his troops had been drastically short of ammunition, which had led to an immediate increase in casualties. Ukraine last month opted to strengthen its defenses in Bakhmut rather than surrender the city, hoping to inflict crucial casualties on Russian forces ahead of a counter-offensive.
Known as “Putin’s chief” for his ties to the Russian leader and past as a Kremlin caterer, Prigozhin made his announcement dressed in full army uniform with an assault rifle slung from his shoulder.
The video was accompanied by a statement addressed to the Chief of the Russian General Staff, the Ministry of Defense and President Vladimir Putin himself.
It was unclear whether it was a serious statement of intent, given its history of sarcasm and reversals, but regardless, it seemed to represent a new phase in an internal struggle that threatened to undermine the Kremlin’s hopes for progress on the battlefield.
The Kremlin said it had seen his announcement but could not comment.
Wagner fighters led the Russian assault on Bakhmut, a months-long campaign that turned into the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. The city has acquired a symbolic value that may outweigh its strategic importance, though Prigozhin has long accused Russian military leaders of ignoring his requests for more munitions and other means of support.
On Thursday night, he posted a graphic video to Telegram apparently showing himself standing over the dead bodies of Wagner fighters and angrily asking Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a profanity-laden tirade, “Where are the grenades?”
“These are Wagner boys who died today. The blood is still fresh,’ said Prigozhin, pointing to the corpses around him. “They came here as volunteers and they die so you can get fat in your offices.”
Prigozhin addresses the top ranks of the Russian military in an irate video posted Thursday evening.HANDOUT / AFP – Getty Images
The United States estimates that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since December, half of them Wagner’s.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a briefing this week that Wagner’s fighters, many of them ex-prisoners, had been thrown into battle without “sufficient combat training, combat leadership or any sense of organizational command and control.”
The raging public feud between military factions will embarrass Putin for the last time, in a week when Moscow accused the US of masterminding a Ukrainian drone attack on the Kremlin in a thwarted assassination attempt.
Both Kiev and Washington have denied the claims, which some analysts speculated could be a Russian false flag designed to rally support for the ailing war effort, but others say was more likely an exposure of its vulnerabilities.
A Ukrainian counter-offensive is believed to be imminent, with Kiev hoping to drive Russian troops onto the defensive after trapping and depleting them in Bakhmut over the winter.
Moscow’s forces are still far from full control of Luhansk and Donetsk, the two eastern regions that make up the sprawling industrial heartland of the Donbas, which Putin claimed to have annexed last year.
