Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group private military company, has suggested a “betrayal” by the Russian authorities as his men run short of ammunition on the Bakhmut front.
Prigozhin, a colourful ex-convict turned hot dog salesman turned restaurateur who eventually became “Putin’s chef” — literally — and somehow parlayed that status into becoming the key player in an international mercenary business, has claimed much of the credit for Russia’s slow advances against the Donbas stronghold of Donbas, whose long-awaited fall to Russian forces had begun to appear inevitable in recent days.
Now, however, Prigozhin is issuing statements that may alarm supporters of the Russian war effort, indicating that his mercenaries, many recruited from prisons, are being deprived of ammunition, possibly with a view to setting them as fall guys if the front collapses and the war is lost.
The mercenary boss said on Sunday that documents had been signed on February 22nd arranging for the supply of artillery shells the next day, but whether as a result of “ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal” little has reached his men, according to the BBC.
His statement followed a more inflammatory video emerging on Saturday — although it was reportedly filmed some time in February — in which he warns that “[i]f now Wagner PMC retreats from Bakhmut, then the entire front will crumble,” perhaps all the way to the Russian border and even beyond.
“If we step back, then we will go down in history forever as the people who took the main step to lose the war,” Prigozhin explained.
“What if they [the Russian authorities] want to set us up, saying that we are scoundrels, and that’s why they don’t give us ammunition, they don’t give us weapons, and they don’t let us replenish our personnel, including from among the imprisoned people?”
While the mercenary’s boss’s may hint merely at the suspected clash between Wagner and Russia’s regular forces behind the scene, with each jealous to prove its own superior effectiveness, possibly at the other’s expense, Prigozhin’s references to a Wagner withdrawal seeing Ukrainian forces “sweep into Luhansk, sweep into Krasnodon, and break into Russian territory” does not suggest complete confidence in an inevitable Russian victory.
“The Russian army will be forced to stabilize the front before the flanks finally crumble. Then Crimea will fall and there will be many other calamities,” Prigozhin said, further predicting that the collapse of his allegedly under-resourced force would become the official military’s excuse for the failure.