Wagner boss to pull troops from Bakhmut over ammunition row

The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has furiously announced that his forces are to retreat from Bakhmut, a key battleground in eastern Ukraine.

“Surrounded by corpses,” Yevgeny Prigozhin delivered an “obscenity-strewn video tirade” against Vladimir Putin’s generals, said The Times, “bringing infighting in the military to a new crisis point”.

He called Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, “scumbags” and said that they would “burn in Hell, eating their guts” for failing to provide his group with enough ammunition.

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Pointing at dozens of corpses, he said: “Their blood is still fresh. And now, listen to me, bitch. These are someone’s fathers and someone’s sons.”

The 61-year-old has followed up with a fresh statement, saying that his forces would leave Bakhmut next week after taking “heavy losses in a brutal, months long battle” there, said The Moscow Times.

His call for more ammunition is “not new”, said CNN. “He has repeatedly complained of receiving insufficient support from the Kremlin,” added the news site. In February, after he made a “similar appeal” for support, he “made another saying a shipment of ammunition was on its way to the Wagner troops”.

The “danger for Moscow”, said The Times, is that Prigozhin could “tap in to popular discontent over the poor management of the war and slip his leash”, as he is “thought to have explored the possibility of launching a political movement”. Alternatively, the Russian army could “decide to eliminate him”, it added.

The Wagner Group is “a private mercenary operation that offers muscle to dictators around the world”, said the Financial Times’s investigative reporter, Miles Johnson.

“In every combat zone” that Wagner members have operated, “allegations have quickly surfaced of human rights abuses, including summary executions, torture, rape and the murder of journalists.”