"Front will collapse": Wagner boss threatens Kremlin with withdrawal from Bachmut

Yevgeny Prigozhin repeatedly attacks the Russian military leadership and makes serious allegations against it.

"Front will collapse": Wagner boss threatens Kremlin with withdrawal from Bachmut

Yevgeny Prigozhin repeatedly attacks the Russian military leadership and makes serious allegations against it. Now the Wagner boss is even threatening to withdraw his mercenaries. The reason: the promised ammunition had not been delivered by the army.

The founder of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, threatens the government in Moscow with withdrawing from the embattled city of Bakhmut because of a lack of ammunition. "If Wagner withdraws from Bakhmut now, the entire front will collapse," Prigozhin said in a video published on Telegram over the weekend. "The situation will not be nice for any military formations protecting Russian interests."

The video was published on a channel that spreads Prigozhin news and identifies with the Wagner group. However, this is not his usual press service channel. On Sunday, Prigozhin said on his official Telegram channel that most of the ammunition promised to his troops in February has not yet been delivered. "Right now we're trying to figure out what's causing this: Is it just ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal."

Prigozhin regularly criticizes Russia's military leadership and thus also indirectly criticizes Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin is dependent on the services of the troops during the war. The Wagner group played a key role in the Donbass offensive in the direction of Bakhmut. Only on Friday did Prigozhin announce that Bakhmut was almost completely surrounded and that only one road was open to Ukrainian troops. "The pincers are closing," he said in an online video.

Moscow's associations have been trying to conquer Bakhmut for months. Taking the city in the Donetsk region would be the first major success of Russia's winter offensive, after the Kremlin called up hundreds of thousands of reservists last fall. Russia hopes that capturing Bakhmut will be an important step towards capturing the rest of the surrounding Donbass industrial area.