Ukraine should ‘double down’ amid Russian rift with mercenary leader, ambassador urges
Mike Brest
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The public spat between a Russian mercenary leader and the country’s defense ministry could be a fissure Ukraine can exploit if they “double down,” according to the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, threatened to withdraw his troops from the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, the front lines of the war, next week because, according to him, the Ministry of Defense is depriving his troops of essential resources and ammunition, leading to the unnecessary deaths of his soldiers.
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In a video posted on Prigozhin’s Telegram account on Friday, he said: “The dead and wounded — and that’s tens of thousands of men — lie on the conscience of those who did not give us ammunition, and this is Defense Minister Shoigu and this is Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov.”
This isn’t the first time Prigozhin has vented his frustration with the ministry’s top leaders about the issue, though it appears to be an escalation of tension between them. It remains unclear if Prigozhin will actually pull his troops on Wednesday, a day after Russia’s celebrated Victory Day, like he said.
“[Russia is] disclosing the fact that they are running out of ammunition,” Ambassador Oksana Markarova said during a Friday event with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. “So, it means sanctions are working. It also means that, you know, there is an opening for us to continue what we have to do to liberate our country now.”
“How shall we interpret this? How shall we look at this?” she asked rhetorically. “It just proves that all the priorities on which we’re working with U.S., first and foremost, but also other allies, weapons, more weapons to us, more financial and other support for us … but also more sanctions to Russia. This is what we should be thinking about, you know, that we will have to double down because we can win it faster. And I think we should see more of it.”
Wagner deployed roughly 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, many of whom were Russian prisoners offered pardons in exchange for fighting in the war and surviving it, the Biden administration has said previously. Earlier this week, officials revealed that Russia had accumulated approximately 100,000 casualties in Bakhmut since December 2022, 20,000 of whom were killed in action. Nearly half of the soldiers who were killed were mercenaries, officials said.
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In one of the videos Prigozhin posted over the last day or so, he was cursing and screaming at ministry leaders while pointing to lines of dead Wagner fighters who could be seen in the gruesome video.
“Shoigu, Gerasimov: These are these are somebody’s [expletive] fathers and somebody’s sons. And those [expletive] who don’t give us ammunition will be in hell eating their guts,” he said.