Wagner Group Boss Yevgeny Prigozhin Announces Plan To Pull Troops Out Of Bakhmut

After posting a video on social media showing him walking among the bodies of dead fighters and asking defense leaders for more supplies, he made his statement.

Even though the city has little military value, Russia has been trying to take it over for months.

Yevgeny Prigozhin blamed the defense ministry for the move.

“Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where’s the… gunpowder?They came here on their own and are willing to die so that you can get fat in your wooden offices.”

Prigozhin’s anger has often been aimed at Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.

He told a Russian pro-war blogger just last week that Wagner troops in Bakhmut were down to their last few days of bullets and needed tens of thousands of rounds.

He warned that if shortages weren’t fixed, his mercenaries would have to flee or stay and die. “Then, no matter what our bureaucrats want, everything else will fall apart,” he said.

Prigozhin said that his troops would stay in Bakhmut until May 10 so that Russia could celebrate Victory Day on Tuesday.

In February, he shared another picture of his dead soldiers and said that the deaths were the fault of the army chiefs. Even though the military said they didn’t intentionally starve his Wagner group of shells, they did react by sending more supplies to the front lines at the time.

If Prigozhin is serious about leaving next week, that would seem to prove that he will do what he said he would do earlier.

Standing in front of his men, he told them on May 10 that they would have to “transfer positions in the settlement of Bakhmut to units of the defense ministry and withdraw the remains of Wagner to logistics camps to lick our wounds.”

The fight for Bakhmut has been going on for months, and it is thought that thousands of people have died in it. The Ukrainian military chose to defend the city at all costs, which seems to be an attempt to get the Russian military to focus on one place that isn’t very important.

Rob Lee, a military expert from the US, says that Wagner’s latest protest about a lack of ammunition is likely a sign that Russia’s defense ministry is limiting supplies before Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive. The ministry has to protect the whole front, but Prigozhin’s only goal is to get Bakhmut, he wrote on Twitter.

Prigozhin has said that the Ukraine’s counter-offensive will start on May 15, when tanks and weapons can move forward without getting wet. This will be after the last spring rain.

Prigozhin also seems to have hired an army general who was just fired from his job as supply chief.

Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev was called “the butcher of Mariupol” because he was in charge of the bombardment of Ukraine’s southern port city last year, when Russian troops took it over.

Online videos show him at a Wagner training camp and then going to posts in Bakhmut.

Prigozhin said earlier that he had offered him the job of deputy to a Wagner leader. He said that the general had done his best to help supply mercenaries with ammunition and had helped the group recruit prisoners to join its ranks.

Col. Gen. Mizintsev was only put in charge of the army’s supplies in September of last year. This was right after Prigozhin was caught on camera in a Russian prison telling prisoners they could get out of jail if they worked with his men in Ukraine.