[ad_1]
For nearly a year, Russia has waged a ferocious battle to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, seeking an advantage after months of humiliating setbacks in the battle.
Although the city has essentially been razed, capturing and ending the longest battle of the war will be a political, if Pyrrhic, victory for Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the paramilitary group Wagner, whose mercenary has led the attack on Bakhmut.
For Mr. Prigozhin, recapturing the city appears to be a personal obsession — so much so that one aspect of the war’s legacy will be the strangely public dispute that took place between him, the man once known as “Putin’s chef,” and Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Mr Prigozhin is an oligarch who amassed his wealth partly through securing catering contracts from the Kremlin – hence the moniker “the chef”. Wagner’s notorious mercenaries have been influential for Moscow in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Mozambique, and are now an important force fighting for Russia in Ukraine – although Mr Prigozhin has publicly acknowledged his ties. for Wagner only in September.
Since then, he has built an aggressive social media presence, portraying himself and his forces as more ruthless and effective fighters than the Russian military, and blaming Moscow’s defense bureaucracy — all despite his close alliance with President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Prigozhin’s accusations about the competence of Russia’s defense minister, paired with the progress of fighters in the grinding battle of Bakhmut, transformed him from a once secretive figure into a political power player on the public stage.
The rift between Mr Prigozhin and Russian defense officials has intensified as the anniversary of the war approaches in February.
By then, Mr. Prigozhin’s group of mercenaries had lost the ability to increase their ranks. The number of troops, some of which were recruited by Mr. Prigozhin from prison, has led to Wagner’s repeated attacks on Bakhmut. But news of Wagner’s astronomical death toll spread to the Russian penal colony, and Mr. Prigozhin announced in early February that he would stop recruiting convicts, without giving a reason.
Not long after, he took aim at figures close to Russia’s command structure, accusing the country’s defense minister and most senior general of treason in a crude and vulgar audio message on social media.
Mr. Prigozhin alleged that military officials deliberately withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner fighters in Bakhmut to destroy them, while, he said, Russian forces elsewhere faced failure after failure.
According to a classified US intelligence document leaked online in April, the dispute escalated to the point where Mr Putin personally got involved, calling Mr Prigozhin and Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, to a meeting believed to have taken place on February 22. concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document said, using an alternative transliteration of the minister’s name.
The general intensity of the dispute began to fluctuate. Mr. Prigozhin eventually said that his fighters in Bakhmut were getting the ammunition they needed, and in April, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged a rare cooperation, saying that Russian paramilitary units were covering the outskirts of Wagner in the west of the city.
But over the course of just three weeks in May, Mr. Prigozhin again accused the Russian military bureaucracy of starving Wagner’s troops of the ammunition they needed to fully capture Bakhmut, this time threatening to withdraw from the city on May 10; appeared to withdraw two days later, as he had done before, this time saying that he had received promises of more arms; undermined the Russian Army’s claims about the “regrouping” of part of its forces in the city by calling it an “accident”; denied reports that he had offered to betray Russian Army locations around Bakhmut if Kyiv agreed to withdraw from the area; and there, declare that Bakhmut is fully under Wagner’s control.
Kyiv quickly denied the latest claims. A few hours later, the Russian Ministry of Defense released a statement that the capture of the city “has been completed” as a result of Wagner’s actions with the support of traditional Russian forces.
[ad_2]
Source link