Sat 29 Apr 2023:
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, has threatened to pull his soldiers out of the troubled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut due to high mortality rates, while a fuel station on Crimea caught fire following a likely drone strike.
“Every day we have stacks of thousands of bodies that we put in coffins and send home,” Prigozhin said in an interview with Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov published on Saturday.
Losses were five times higher than necessary because of the lack of artillery ammunition, Prigozhin said.
The Wagner chief said he has written to Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu asking for supplies as soon as possible. “If the ammunition deficit is not replenished, we are forced – in order not to run like cowardly rats afterwards – to either withdraw or die,” the 61-year-old asserted.
Prigozhin said he would probably be forced to withdraw some of his troops, but warned that this would mean that the front would collapse elsewhere.
There has been fighting over Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine for months. Casualties are high on both sides. The Ukrainian defenders control only a small area in the west of the city.
Earlier in the day, a fuel tank caught fire in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol following what was thought to have been a drone attack, the Russian-installed Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on Telegram, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
Ukrainian military intelligence said later that 10 oil tanks were destroyed, without stating that Kiev had assumed responsibility for the attack, however. At the same time, authority spokesman Andriy Yusov stressed that such explosions will continue.
The total volume of the tanks had been “about 40,000 tons,” said Yusov. “This is God’s punishment especially for the killed citizens in Uman, among whom are five children,” he said, referring to a Russian missile attack in the central Ukrainian city the day before.
According to him, the fuel depot is used by the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Crimea.
Russia’s Razvozhayev said an area of 1,000 square metres had been engulfed in flames.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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