RUSSIAN POSITION AT BAKHMUT AT RISK WITHOUT PROMISED AMMUNITION, WAGNER CHIEF SAYS

Mon 06 March 2023:

The leader of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force warned that without ammunition, Russia’s position near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was in danger, the most recent indication of a rift between the Kremlin and the leader of the private militia.

According to Ukrainian military officials and analysts, leaders of Russia’s 155th Brigade fighting near the town of Vuhledar, south of Bakhmut, were resisting orders to attack after suffering heavy losses in previous attempts to capture it.

Russian forces, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, on Sunday in the southeast Zaporizhzhia region. The ministry made no further mention of the assault.

The battlefield accounts could not be independently verified by Reuters.

Prigozhin threatens Putin with a retreat

Sitting in some basement, he said that the retreat of mercenaries from #Bakhmut due to “ammunition shortage” would lead to the collapse of the front up to the Russian border “or even further”, as well as that #Crimea would be de-occupied. pic.twitter.com/tScnxmTpTA

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) March 5, 2023

Russia’s front lines near Bakhmut could collapse, according to Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, if his forces do not receive the ammunition promised by Moscow in February.

Prigozhin said in a nearly four-minute video posted on the Wagner Orchestra Telegram channel on Saturday that his troops were concerned that the government would use them as scapegoats if Russia lost the war.

“For now, we are trying to figure out the reason: is it just ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal,” Prigozhin, referring to the absence of ammunition, said in his press service Telegram channel on Sunday.

The mercenary chief regularly criticises Russia’s defence chiefs and top generals. Last month, he accused Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and others of “treason” for withholding supplies of munitions to his men.

In a nearly four-minute video published on the Wagner Orchestra Telegram channel on Saturday, Prigozhin said his troops were worried that the government wanted to set them up as possible scapegoats if Russia lost the war.

“If Wagner retreats from Bakhmut now, the whole front will collapse,” Prigozhin said. “The situation will not be sweet for all military formations protecting Russian interests.”

Volodymyr Nazarenko, a commander of Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, said that there had been no order to retreat and “the defence is holding” in grim conditions.

“The situation in Bakhmut and around it is very much hell-like, as it is on the entire eastern front,” Nazarenko said in a video posted on Telegram.

After mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists last year, a Russian victory in Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of about 70,000, would give it the first significant victory in a costly winter offensive. According to Russia, it would be a necessary step toward achieving one of its top priorities, the conquest of the industrial region of the Donbas.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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