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 ammunition, my boys will not suffer 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’ll rob the Russian people of victory.” At the same time he wrote: “If Russia will be in danger, we will again come to the defense.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov only said in a first reaction: “Of course we saw it in the media. But I can’t comment on it because it affects the course of the military special operation.”
“Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the damn shit is the ammunition?”
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. “Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the damn shit is the ammunition?” he shouted in a video also published on Telegram, which showed him in front of the bodies of alleged Wagner fighters.
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.
