The owner of the Wagner mercenary company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claims to have received all kinds of concessions from the Russian high command two days after displaying the bodies of dozens of his dead soldiers.
He then accused the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff and sole commander of the military campaign, Valery Gerasimov, of those deaths, whom he also insulted.
The businessman has stated through a new statement that his group will not only receive all the ammunition necessary to continue its bloody and long offensive for Bakhmut, but the Russian army will provide it with the cover it needs.
The Ukrainian authorities did not buy his bluff that the unit would leave the city on May 10, just after Russia's sacrosanct Victory Day celebration, and saw no sign of withdrawal.
But beyond the possible
maskirovka
—military deception—, the display of corpses and Prigozhin's insults have reopened the tension in the Russian high command when the Ukrainian counteroffensive seems imminent.
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“They have promised us to deliver the ammunition and weapons that we need to continue with our actions;
They swear to us that everything necessary will be deployed on the flank so that the enemy does not isolate us;
they tell us that we can act in Artemovsk (Bakhmut's old name) as we see fit and they give us [General Sergei] Surovikin as the person who will make all decisions in the framework of hostilities for the cooperation of the Wagner Group with the Ministry Defense," Prigozhin said.
An indication of the dissensions in the high command is precisely the new appointment of General Surovikin, with whom the Wagner Group sympathizes and who was demoted in January, just three months after being elected sole commander of the Russian forces in Ukraine.
His replacement by Valeri Gerasimov was seen among Russian military analysts as the staging of internal disputes in the Russian high command.
For the owner of the mercenary group, Surovikin "is the only person with the general star in the army who knows how to fight."
"There is no more reasonable person with this star," Prigozhin stressed two days after denouncing that his forces barely received 10% of the ammunition he needed.
“Shoigu!
Gerasimov!
Where's the ammo?
Look at them, bitches!” The businessman yelled on camera in front of the rows of dead soldiers in a video that has caused commotion within Russia.
Grudges take their toll on the battlefield
The disputes in the Russian high command have taken their toll on the forces on the battlefield in a war that has lasted for a year and almost three months.
According to US intelligence documents leaked by military officer Jack Teixeira, Vladimir Putin himself had to intervene in February and sit Prigozhin and Shoigu together when the former began another smear campaign against the Defense Minister.
The reports, revealed by
The Washington Post
,
also include that Defense came to consider launching another communication campaign against Prigozhin, but did not find any well-known figure capable of turning public opinion against the businessman.
In his personal dispute with Shoigu and Gerasimov, Prigozhin has found several allies in the Russian armed forces.
Among the best known, Surovikin and the recently dismissed head of Russian logistics, Mikhail Mizintsev, known as
the Mariupol Butcher
and Wagner's brand new signing, now as deputy commander of one of his units.
In addition, Prigozhin has also found an ally in the president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Both launched the harshest criticism of the Defense Ministry during last year's fall debacle, when Russia withdrew in the Kharkov and Kherson regions, pressured by the first major Ukrainian counteroffensive.
And both contacted these days to raise the possibility of replacing Wagner's worn-out units with Chechen fighters.
"Let's never do that"
In this crisis, Kadyrov once again sided with Prigozhin.
“It is unpleasant for me, as for all those who are not indifferent to the fate of our country, to listen to the latest statements by Yevgeny Viktorovich —Prigozhin—;
and it is doubly unpleasant that the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry does not meet with the leadership of the Wagner Group to make any decision or make a clarification.
After all, Prigozhin deserves respect for the invaluable contribution of the members of Wagner in the liberation of the cities of Donbas", affirmed the Chechen president through his social networks after this new confrontation broke out, and recalled that his paramilitary units, the
kadyrovtsi
, have also been short of supplies in the war, although he left a message for Wagner.
“By the way, filming the bodies of dead comrades to protest in public…is wrong.
Let's never do that."
If Prigozhin's announcement is true, the Russian high command would reinforce Wagner in its war of attrition in Bakhmut just as the Russian authorities have ordered the removal of the population of nearly two dozen towns in the occupied Zaporizhia area.
They fear that the new Ukrainian offensive will begin there in the coming days or weeks.
According to US intelligence, Wagner, nurtured with inmates promised clemency after the end of his six-month contract, has borne roughly half of Russia's casualties since winter due to its brutal Bakhmut offensive.
Washington claims that the losses of the Kremlin's armed forces have since then totaled 20,000 dead and 80,000 wounded.
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