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A day after declaring victory in Bakhmut, the private military company Wagner said on Thursday that it had turned over the Ukrainian city to the Russian Army, which will now have to do without the help of the brutal mercenary forces it has become dependent on. .
Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, suggested that Russian regular soldiers could not expect help from the group – at least not in Bakhmut. In a three-minute video, Mr Prigozhin was shown visiting what he said were Wagner’s positions in the city and telling his fighters to surrender to Russian forces.
“Leave the soap on, but put away your toothbrush,” he said.
Wagner’s withdrawal could open a new phase of the month-long struggle for Bakhmut, testing whether the Russian Army can hold hard-won ground against Ukrainian forces that have advanced on the outskirts of the city and are preparing to launch a wider counter-offensive.
“Now the Russian General Staff has to find enough reserves to fill the resulting gap,” Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst for Meduza, a Russian news website, said in response to a written question. “This is in addition to preventing Ukrainian attacks, which also require large reserves.”
Ukraine has admitted that despite the firepower devoted to the capture of Bakhmut, where tens of thousands have died, the Russians now control almost the entire city. He said his forces are shifting their focus to making it difficult for Russia to capture Bakhmut or move deeper into eastern Ukraine.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said that Ukrainian forces are taking control of the area south-west of Bakhmut and that they are trying to gain further gains on the outskirts.
“In the direction of Bakhmut, the enemy tried to stop our advance on the flanks with artillery fire,” Ms. Maliar said. “Now the enemy is pulling additional units to the periphery to reinforce.”
Regular Russian Army units have replaced Wagner fighters on the outskirts of Bakhmut, he said, while Wagner’s forces remain inside the city.
Repositioning around the city comes as Russia and Ukraine engage in drone warfare on Thursday.
Ukraine’s military said it shot down dozens of Russian drones aimed at targets across the country before dawn, while Russian officials said they had foiled a Ukrainian air and maritime drone strike aimed at the Russian Black Sea Fleet home in Sevastopol, Crimea. .
Although its forces have strengthened a maze of fortified defensive positions across hundreds of miles of farmland, rice paddies and riverbanks in recent weeks, Moscow has also stepped up aerial bombardment in an attempt to disrupt Ukraine’s military preparations for a counterattack, according to Ukrainian officials and officials. military analyst.
Ukraine has for weeks been targeting Russian command and control centers, rail lines, airfields and other military installations in its territory with the express aim of limiting Moscow’s ability to move troops and equipment quickly and effectively.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Thursday that the new military action was all part of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which he said would not be marked by a “single event.”
There are “dozens of different actions,” Mr. Podolyak said post on Twitteraiming to destroy “occupation forces in different directions, which has happened yesterday, is happening today and will continue tomorrow.”
“Destroying intensive enemy logistics is also a counterattack,” he said.
Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy intelligence chief, said disrupting Russian military movements in Crimea was essential to Ukraine’s campaign. “Reinforcements and redeployment of troops, supplies of ammunition and equipment in the occupied territories all go through Crimea,” he told the German publication Welt in an interview published Thursday.
Crimea has enormous symbolic and military value for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, who seized the peninsula in 2014 and has described it as the centerpiece of what he sees as Russia’s national restoration.
On Thursday, the Kremlin-appointed governor of Crimea said that several Ukrainian drone strikes had been foiled in the region. And Russia’s appointed governor of the Crimean port of Sevastopol said two aerial drones had been shot down with small arms and several maritime drones had been killed using electronic warfare tools that jammed their signals.
These claims cannot be independently verified.
The capture of Bakhmut had given Moscow a rare and costly victory, and explained how dependent Wagner’s troops and outspoken leaders were, who had been highly critical of the Russian military.
For many supporters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Wagner group, with its strict discipline and agile decision-making, has become a model for what the Russian Army, hampered by a complex bureaucracy, should look like.
In recent days, buoyed by the victory in Bakhmut, Mr. Prigozhin has become still outspoken, warning the Russian elite that they face the prospect of a popular uprising if they do not put the country on a real footing of war.
But for all the infighting, Wagner and the Russian Army also depended on each other. While Mr Prigozhin has some of the best assault troops fighting on Russia’s side, the Ministry of Defense has a larger stockpile of weapons – much to Mr Prigozhin’s frustration.
While Russia’s military leaders would prefer not to rely on Wagner for help any longer, said Mr. Kuznets, the military analyst, Moscow’s lack of sufficient troops makes mercenaries in Ukraine “inevitable.”
In Bakhmut on Thursday, Mr. Prigozhin signaled that Wagner would resign in a few days.
“We’re going to rest and get ready,” he said in his latest video. “Then we will receive a new assignment.”
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