Moscow After complaints about a lack of ammunition, the head of the Russian mercenary force Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has threatened the Kremlin with the withdrawal of its fighters from the heavily contested Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the coming week. “Without ammo, my boys won’t take unnecessarily high casualties. That is why we are withdrawing from the village of Bakhmut from May 10, 2023,” said Prigozhin in a video published Friday on his Telegram channel.
In Bakhmut, for which the Russians have been fighting for months in extremely costly battles, everything but 2.5 square kilometers of 45 square kilometers has already been conquered, Prigozhin claimed. “If you don’t give us grenades, you won’t rob us of victory, you rob the Russian people of victory.”
Kremlin declines comment
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov only said in a first reaction: “Of course we saw that in the media. But I cannot comment on that because it concerns the course of the military special operation.”
Russia has been waging a war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine for more than 14 months. Especially against the background of the fighting over Bakhmut, power struggles between the Wagner boss and Russia’s regular army have recently become increasingly common.
Just a few hours before his withdrawal threat, Prigozhin had turned to Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov with wild insults and demanded better care for his men.
A video published on Friday shows the 61-year-old in front of numerous bodies lined up in a meadow in the dark.
(Photo: dpa)
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“Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the bloody shit is the ammunition?” he yelled in a video also published on Telegram, which showed him in front of the bodies of alleged Wagner fighters.
Bachmut fought for months
The area around the town of Bachmut, which had a good 70,000 inhabitants before the war, has been heavily contested since October. With heavy losses, the Wagner fighters pushed the Ukrainians back further and further, but were not able to completely conquer Bachmut. A withdrawal from the now completely destroyed city in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk would not be a particularly significant defeat for Moscow from a military-strategic point of view – but from a symbolic point of view it would be all the more so.
It is not known how many Wagner mercenaries are currently fighting in Bachmut. According to Russian military bloggers, however, they are said to be operating almost alone in the city itself, with regular soldiers only supporting them on the flanks. According to Ukrainian information, Russian airborne troops and a motorized rifle brigade are also stationed near Bakhmut.
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