Posted on 03/06/2023 9:22:36 AM PST by jerod
The founder of Russia's Wagner mercenary force has said his troops now tightening their grip on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut are being deprived of ammunition and that, if they are forced to retreat, the entire front will collapse.
Yevgeny Prigozhin had said on Friday that his units had "practically surrounded Bakhmut," where fighting has intensified in the past week after months of attritional warfare, with Russian forces attacking from three sides.
Wagner often appears to operate autonomously from the regular army, or even in competition with it, and in a video published over the weekend, Prigozhin complained that the ammunition that Moscow had promised it had not been delivered.
"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."
Reuters could not independently verify when and where the video was recorded. It was published not on Prigozhin's usual press service Telegram channel, but on one that has associated itself with Wagner and disseminated news about Prigozhin.
On his usual channel, Prigozhin also mentioned the lack of ammunition, saying on Sunday: "For now, we are trying to figure out the reason: Is it just ordinary bureaucracy, or a betrayal?"
Prigozhin regularly criticizes the military hierarchy and last month accused Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and others of "treason" for withholding munitions. Shoigu has been visiting forces in Ukraine to award medals and meet commanders and on Monday was in the eastern city of Mariupol, captured by Russian forces last year after a months-long siege.
In the nearly four-minute video published on the Wagner Orchestra Telegram channel on Saturday, Prigozhin said his troops were worried that Moscow wanted to set them up as potential scapegoats if Russia lost the war.
"If we retreat, then we will go down in history forever as people who have taken the main step towards losing the war," he said.
"This is exactly the problem with 'ammunition hunger'."
Russian nationalist ex-rebel commander Igor Girkin, a prominent opponent of Prigozhin's, said without citing evidence that the doom-laden video published on the weekend had been recorded at the height of that row, about two weeks ago.
Prigozhin has used the war to become a public figure in Russia, and strong signs have emerged in the past month that the Kremlin wants to clip his wings after he began feuding with the defence establishment.
The Defence Ministry said last month it was "absolutely untrue" that Wagner was being starved of ammunition...
Russian unit disobey orders: unconfirmed reports
Belgorod borders Ukraine's Kharkiv region and has repeatedly come under fire since the beginning of Russia's invasion. Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia.
Near Vuhledar, southwest of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, Ukraine said senior officers of Russia's 155th Brigade, which Kyiv says suffered heavy recent losses, were refusing to obey orders to attack.
"The leaders of the brigade and senior officers are refusing to proceed with a new senseless attack as demanded by their unskilled commanders — to storm well-defended Ukrainian positions with little protection or preparation," Ukraine's military said in a statement.
Military analyst Zhdanov said two "Cossack" Russian units known as Steppe and Tiger had expressed frustration with their commanders and refused to take part in any new offensive on the hilltop town.
Reuters could not immediately verify the reports.
I have to talk in simple terms for simple minds. You’re right though, my time for simpletons is at an end for the day. I’m well past my quota.
Ukraine exists on the invasion route for, well, everywhere.
There are battle sites that have been found from neolithic times.
Russia will not allow that invasion route to be outside it’s sphere of influence. The current Ukrainians will not allow themselves to be willing in that sphere of influence.
There is no good way out of this. Neither side can back down.
NATO has boots heading to Poland.
Because the next act WILL be Russian pushing to the Baltic, and maybe Sweden.
That doesn’t mean they will do it right away, but they will.
“When I’m in command, every mission is a suicide mission!”.
It’s not it’s not a distracting argument you are believing what western media tells you and then you started there’s no way they can all collude and lied to us and I hate to break it to you but they sure as hell can and they have prolonged time but does Ukraine war takee to a level I’ve never seen before
I do not believe what I say I don’t believe that Wagner is running out of ammunition not for a second that’s ridiculous
Maybe so but we have reporters etc infiltrated on a large scale and some investigated
It Putin is so heavy handed with his press why does he take hard questions
I stated he does not suffer ridicule like Trump did But he sure as hell text hard questions I enjoy watching his press conferences do you actually learn some things and to move the most illustrative part of it is Moscow media is liberal just like American media and antagonistic
Conservatives which means Putin supporters in Russia have a hard time in Russian media they are ostracized
Freepers don’t know any of the stuff
They firmly believe it’s still the Soviet union and everything is just the same and that’s just bullshit
Is it better than America not yet
Does their leader love his country and traditional culture more than our leader does you damn right he does and I know that gets under your skin but that is the primary reason your allies and globalism have it out for him it’s no different than trump except he’s a Russian with his own set of problems and desires and issues and the one we’re living out now is he’s made it very clear he’s going to secure his borders unlike our own government
This is the ultimate example of projection by NATO, the Ukrainians and Biden regime.
Sure he takes hard questions because it is all scripted. He has played the same game since he was a young KGB operative, When Kursk mothers got in a genuine question Putin insulted them. He does not love his country. He loves power and thus the same ugly leprechaun has been holding on to power for 23 years.
By Putin’s own words he is a Stalin nostalgia guy. Putin worked hard to erase the era of good feelings that Yeltsin created. His war crimes against the Republic of Georgia and Ukraine cannot just be shrugged off. Neither can the arrests of his political opposition.
Solzhenitsyn loved Russia. Putin loves himself.
Yesterday the Kyiv Independent reported from near the frontline about the bad situation for the Ukrainian troops fighting there:
Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’
Russia’s relentless assault on Bakhmut is sacrificing waves and waves of unprepared men being sent to their deaths. But multiple defenders of this embattled city in Donetsk Oblast feel that they are in a similar boat, according to interviews with more than a dozen soldiers currently fighting in or around Bakhmut.
During their brief visits to the nearby town of Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian infantrymen told the Kyiv Independent of unprepared, poorly-trained battalions being thrown into the front line meat grinder to survive as best they could with little support from armored vehicles, mortars, artillery, drones and tactical information.
“We don’t get any support,” says a soldier named Serhiy, who has been fighting on the front lines in Bakhmut, sitting down with his friend, also named Serhiy, for a conversation in a small cafe in the Kostiantynivka market. Both men are in their 40s but one of them is a bit older than the other.
The soldiers lack about everything that would support their defense:
They say that Russian artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are often allowed to strike Ukrainian positions for hours or days without being shut down by Ukrainian heavy weapons. Some complained of poor coordination and situational awareness, allowing this to happen or making it even worse.
Mortarmen spoke of extreme ammunition scarcity and having to use weapons dating back to World War II. Drones that are supposed to provide critical reconnaissance information are also scarce and are being lost at very high rates in some parts of the battlefield.
All this leads to terrifying casualties of both dead and wounded. "The battalion came in in the middle of December… between all the different platoons, there were 500 of us," says Borys, a combat medic from Odesa Oblast fighting around Bakhmut. "A month ago, there were literally 150 of us."
“When you go out to the position, it’s not even a 50/50 chance that you’ll come out of there (alive),” says the older Serhiy. “It’s more like 30/70.”
The soldiers describe the Russian operation as small reconnaissance followed by artillery fire. This is repeated again and again until it has reached the desired result. The very reasonable application of this tactic is why I disregard claims of 'waves or Russian cannon fodder storming forward' or of 'high Russian losses'. They are obviously nonsense:
The older Serhiy says that the enemy likes to send a team of three or four expendable foot soldiers to attack and make the Ukrainians expose themselves by shooting at them. At that point, the more elite forces zero in on the defenders’ position.
Once they begin exchanging fire, the Ukrainians are struck with heavier weapons like Russian mortars and rockets from Grad multiple launch rocket systems or BMP infantry fighting vehicles and BTR armored personnel carriers with machine guns.
“They get the positions where we are, establish the coordinates, then they hit us from seven to nine kilometers out with mortars,” as well as from closer by with grenade launchers, says the older Serhiy. “They wait for the house to fall so we have to jump out. The building catches fire and then they try to finish us off.”
“Their birds come out and they chase us with fire,” adds the younger Serhiy, referring to Russian UAVs, like quadcopters and Orlan-10 fixed wing drones that spot distant heavy weapons. “They hit accurately.”
As Russians destroy more and more buildings, Ukrainians keep losing more places where they can reliably take cover. Borys the medic says people have been lost when their entrenched positions collapsed from heavy Russian fire, suffocating them.
“I’ll put it like this, we should get our people out because if we don’t take off, then in the next few weeks, it’s going to be bad,” says Oleksandr. A mortarman named Illia agrees that Bakhmut is “practically encircled.”
For lack of ammunition there is no Ukrainian counter artillery fire. Infantry fighting vehicles are held back from the front. The little trained Territorial Brigades are send in at night to be killed the next morning:
Multiple soldiers say Bakhmut troops are barely given enough time to learn to shoot a rifle – sometimes their training is just 2 weeks, before they’re dropped into the hottest parts of the most intense current battle of the war. They would have preferred for troops to get a minimum of two or three months of training before being deployed to such a hot spot.
“Two weeks’ live training and they’re sent here. You can’t do that,” says the older Serhiy. “Or it’s a person who once served in the army, how long ago was that? Obviously they forgot everything.”
“We were promised that we wouldn’t be sent to the zero line right away, that at first we’d be sent to the second or third line,” he continues. “And then we came here in the middle of the night and they immediately sent us to Bakhmut.”
... According to both soldiers named Serhiy, most brigades are insufficiently trained and lack the experience for an environment as brutal as Bakhmut. People are taken at night to a place they’d never seen before and the battle starts in the morning.
“This is why positions are abandoned, people are there for the first time,” says the younger Serhiy. “I went to a position three times and was given six people who hadn’t fought at all before. We had a few dead and wounded that had to be evacuated… Our people are not being protected.”
Oleksandr confirms that while some battalions fighting in Bakhmut are well-trained and ready, most of them aren’t and many were thrown in at night without much preparation. “Yes, that’s true, my battalion was not prepared,” he says. After five months without a single break from the fighting, only half of Oleksandr’s battalion is left, he says.
“They shouldn’t have rushed to throw everyone in there,” says the younger Serhiy. “Better to abandon those positions, who cares? It’s better to properly train people.”
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