After weeks of unexpected setbacks on the battlefield for Russia, Sunday’s war in Ukraine brought another surprise:
the emergence of a former Russian convict and former hot dog salesman as possibly the best hope of the Kremlin for a small face-saving military victory.
With the Russian occupation forces in danger in the strategic southern city of Kherson, troops with a private military force controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhina convicted thief and former collaborator of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putinadvanced to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Bakhmut in the east of the country.
The city, attacked by Russia for months, has little strategic value, but a victory for Moscow would break it humiliating strip of defeats and would boost the political fortunes of Prigozhin, an obscure businessman who served nine years in a Soviet prison for robbery.
Prigozhin used to be mocked as “Putin’s cook” because of his commercial interests in restaurants, but now he is afgrowing strength in Russia’s labyrinthine power politics.
While firmly loyal to Putin in his public statements, Prigozhin has shown an increasingly assertive and independent figure, denouncing Kremlin-appointed military commanders and, on a recent visit to Russia Kursk, meeting with local entrepreneurs on the organization of a specific popular militia outside the regular military command.
One of the commanders he criticized, Colonel General Alexander Lapin, head of Russia’s Central Military District, has since left his post, according to Russian state media, and has been replaced, at least temporarily, by Maj. General Aleksandr Linkov .
The top commanders of the eastern, southern and western military districts have been replaced since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 2.
Under the gun of Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, the Russian Defense Ministry last month appointed a new commander general for its forces in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, over military failures in Ukraine. ,
The British military intelligence agency, in its latest daily update on the war in Ukraine, said Sunday that “the layoffs represent a model of guilt against senior Russian military commanders for failing to achieve Russian objectives on the battlefield “.
The frequent military reorganization, he added, “is in part likely an attempt to isolate and shift the blame from Russian top leaders back home.”
While the regular army has often failed in Ukraine, Prigozhin’s private force, the Wagne Groupr, at times fought more, particularly around Bakhmut in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
A correspondent for the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said Sunday that Wagner’s troops had seized the village of Ivangrad, which is located near a highway on the southern approach to Bakhmut, and were fighting bitter battles in another suburb. .
A spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, Serhii Cherevaty, said Bakhmut is “one of the hottest spots” in the region and where “the enemy is more aggressive, with the concentration of its maximum forces”.
He told a Ukrainian TV channel that they took sides 30,000 soldiers Russians for the assault.
Bakhmut’s capture would not make up for Russia’s September defeat in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, now largely under Ukrainian control, or news of a beating recently near a city in Luhansk, another eastern region.
Russian media Verstka, reported Saturday that hundreds of Russian soldiers, mostly conscripts recruited as part of Putin’s recent “partial mobilization”, had been murdered near the town of Makiivka in Luhansk.
The report quoted Aleksey Agafonov, a recently mobilized soldier who survived, saying that his unit had been ordered to dig defensive trenches near Ukrainian positions, but was only given three blades and no provision.
When Ukraine began bombing, he said, “the officers immediately fled,” leaving his men untrained in the open to deal with Ukrainian artillery, mortar and helicopter fire.
As Russian forces advanced on Bakhmut, a larger and perhaps decisive battle loomed for the southern port city of Kherson.
Russia seized the city on the west bank of the Dnieper River early in the war and declared it part of the Russian Federation last month.
But, warning of an impending Ukrainian attack, he has since urged civilians to evacuate to the east bank of the river.
Kiril Stremousov, the Moscow-based deputy head of the occupied Kherson region, said on Sunday that Ukraine was moving large numbers of tanks and armored vehicles to the area.
The evacuation of civilians, he said, is underway. Russia also accused Ukraine of damaging the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam upstream of the city of Kherson with US-made HIMAR rockets.
Volodymyr Zelenskythe Ukrainian president accused Moscow last month of planning to attack the dam in a “false flag”
The Ukrainian army general staff said Sunday that its forces had attacked a building in Kakhovka, but only because it was used to house “up to 200 enemy soldiers”, adding that “the enemy carefully hides the consequences of this attack”.
He also accused Russia of destroying private ships on the banks of the Dnieper, ostensibly to prevent Ukraine from using them in case Russian troops withdrew from the city of Kherson on the east bank of the river.
Confronted on the battlefield by motivated and well-armed Ukrainian troops, thanks to Western support, Russia has become increasingly furious with civilians, trying to undermine Ukraine’s morale by hitting power plants and other infrastructure with drone and missile attacks. .
In his late night speech on Sunday, Zelenskyy said:
“We also understand that the terrorist state is concentrating forces and means for a possible repeat of massive attacks on our infrastructure. Energy first. ”Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv, the capital, warned residents on Saturday to prepare for the worst.
“Let’s be honest, our enemies are doing everything to keep the city without heating, without electricity, without water supply, in general, so that we all die,” he told Ukrainian media.
“The future of the country and the future of each of us depends on how well we are prepared”.
The Kremlin, worried at home with questions about what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine, seems to be hoping that Prigozhin’s Wagner group will at least give Bakhmut some good news.
Russian forces have been advancing in the eastern Ukrainian city for months, making little progress so far in what Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for a New American Security, described as a “senseless offensive“.
The outcome of the battle for Bakhmut is unlikely to change the overall dynamics of the war, but Kofman said on the podcast War on the rocks that the city would be a major reward for Prigozhin, increasing his stature within the Kremlin.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Prigozhin was working to expand his influence by protecting his ambitions behind declarations of loyalty to Putin and calls for national unity. These appeals, he added, are intended to “appeal to Russian nationalists and civilians and deflect criticism of their fairly open efforts to build an independent power base.”
Prigozhin, who faced US sanctions for meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of a farm trolls on the internet who ran in St. Petersburg, insisted for years that he was just a businessman running a restaurant business.
But, based on the close military contacts he established through his work providing food to soldiers, he earned a reputation as a top secret broker for the Kremlin by recruiting mercenaries to serve Russian interests in the Middle East and Africa.
Wagner recruits witnessed the action in Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic, where the force was embroiled in a public scandal following the 2018 murder of three Russian journalists investigating Prigozhin’s activities in the former French colony.
Losing much of his former secrecy, Prigozhin has become an increasingly outspoken public figure, demanding that military commanders, including Lapin, be sent “to running barefoot at the front with guns ”to punish them for their incompetence.
After years of denying any ties to the Wagner group, Prigozhin blew his cover since the start of the war in Ukraine, formally acknowledging his role as founder in late September.
A sinuous glass tower in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, was renamed on Friday as the Wagner Centerwhich Prigozhin, in a statement, said would serve as a “military technology center” for inventors, engineers and information technology specialists aimed at “improving Russia’s defense capabilities, including in the information sphere.”
Cassandra Vinograd, Oleg Matsnev and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed to the reporting.
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Source: Clarin
