Russia vows more munitions in Ukraine
Wagner chief rescinds threat to pull fighters
The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group said Sunday that he had been promised as much ammunition and weaponry as needed to continue the fight for the embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, two days after he threatened to withdraw his fighters because Moscow’s Ministry of Defense was failing to support them.
“We have been promised as much ammunition and armament as we need to keep going,” the Wagner group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said in an audio statement released Sunday on his channel on the Telegram messaging app. There was no immediate comment from Russia’s defense ministry.
On Friday, Prigozhin launched what was widely considered an effort at brinkmanship by threatening to withdraw all of his fighters from Bakhmut, accusing Russia’s military bureaucracy of starving him of the ammunition needed to fully capture the city. He had appeared in a gruesome video standing in front of row after row of what he said were freshly killed fighters, saying the ministry had caused “useless and unjustified” losses by failing to replenish the ammunition stocks.
While Prigozhin had complained about ammunition shortages and threatened to pull out of the city before, he had not previously given a date. This time, he named Wednesday — the day after Russia’s Victory Day holiday — as the deadline for his forces to withdraw and “lick their wounds.” The May 9 holiday celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and has taken on particular resonance in Russia amid its war in Ukraine.
General Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, wrote on Telegram on Sunday that he had visited troops in the area of Bakhmut, where he previously said Russia was employing “scorched-earth tactics.” The shelling has intensified, he said, as Russia attempts to seize the city by Tuesday.
“Our task is to prevent this,” he wrote.
Few military analysts expected Prigozhin to carry out his threat, especially because Russia’s Ministry of Defense has no real alternative to the estimated 10,000 Wagner fighters fighting for control of the devastated city, where 70,000 people lived before the invasion.
A sliver of Bakhmut remains in Ukrainian hands, with the Russian Ministry of Defense claiming Sunday that its forces had made further small advances. All the territory Russia has gained during months of grinding conflict in the city has come at an enormous cost for both sides, including the deaths of thousands of fighters recruited by Wagner from Russian prisons and thrown right onto the battlefield.
Prigozhin also said that General Sergei Surovikin, the commander of the air force nicknamed “General Armageddon,” had been appointed as his liaison with the military.
If confirmed, the appointment of Surovikin, who developed a close relationship with Wagner while commanding the Russian forces in Syria, could help address the deep-seated tension between the Wagner mercenary forces and the regular Russian army, which has repeatedly interrupted Russian efforts to push forward in Ukraine.
Surovikin was appointed overall commander of the Russian forces in Ukraine last October, which was considered a sign that Prigozhin was gaining influence in the Kremlin. But he was then replaced three months later by General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of staff of the Russian military.
Prigozhin openly cursed Gerasimov and Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defense, in his expletive-laden video Friday. Some analysts have attributed the tensions to rivalries for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favor.
It is unclear whether the ammunition promised to Prigozhin can be deployed fast enough to change the battle for the city that started in August. In threatening to withdraw, Prigozhin stressed just how weary his men were of the fight.
But the chances of that seem remote. Ukraine is expected to soon begin a counteroffensive powered by fresh supplies of advanced Western military equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers that have already arrived in the country.
Also on Sunday, the Kremlin-installed authorities in Crimea said Ukraine had launched a wave of drones on the occupied peninsula overnight, the latest in a string of reported attacks on Russianheld territory before the expected counteroffensive.
Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-appointed governor of the port of Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea and home to the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet, said that “more than 10” drones were involved in the attack.
The claims could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian officials had not commented.
Six Ukrainian mine disposal experts were killed when they came under fire from Russian forces while they were working in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said Saturday.
Meanwhile, Zakhar Prilepin, a famous Russian novelist and nationalist ideologue, was in stable condition Sunday after surviving an attempt to assassinate him a day earlier, when his Audi SUV blew up near the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
Prilepin, an outspoken supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and volunteer fighter there sporadically since 2014, was in “good spirits” after sustaining serious leg injuries, his spokesperson, Yelizaveta Kondakova, told the Russian news agency Tass.