Prigozhin’s “betrayal” leaves Bakhmut and the entire eastern front naked before the Ukrainian counteroffensive

From the political point of view, the situation is extremely complicated for Vladimir Putin. What kind of leadership is his when he gets his country into a war with a very high cost in human lives and he is not even capable of controlling his subordinates? after passing twenty years poisoning political enemies and dissimilar journalists, the leadership of the Russian autocrat seems to be teetering between public disagreements and the emergence of private armies like taifa kingdoms. Nobody knows who is in charge right now in the Russian army. No one knows who even made the decision to entrust everything to the conquest of Bakhmut.

A conquest, moreover, that does not seem to be completed. As Prigozhin rightly points out, could have been a week agowhen the Ukrainians entrenched themselves in the last neighborhood of the western zone and prepared the road from Ivanivske to Chasiv Yar for a possible withdrawal. It doesn’t look like things are going to change again before May 9th, victory day, as Putin intended, nor later. If Wagner eventually withdraws from the city, there are insufficient means in the Russian regular army to replace those troops. There never has been, on the other hand.

The troops of the Wagner Group are the best prepared and the best supplied on the Russian side. Neither Gerasimov’s men not much less Kadyrov’s Chechens they can replace them in the enterprise of conquering a city street by street. Not, of course, without sending troops from other places on the front, which in turn would put the entire Russian occupied zone at risk and would shake the borders of February 2022 and even those of 2014, when the war in Donbas began. Ukrainian troops continue to advance by Avdiivka and Vuhledarthey will soon be at the gates of the capital Donetsk.

Trenches as a last resort

All this, we insist, assuming that Prigozhin carries out his threat. Now, even if in the end “dissuade” for him to keep his men in Bakhmut, it seems unlikely that he will be able to complete his mission. It’s obvious from his desperation that he doesn’t have ammunition for it. It is also obvious that he has lost so many men that his army is a shadow of what it was when he arrived from Africa in March 2022 to help in the failed “special military operation”. You can’t expect anything from them, and you certainly can’t expect the Kremlin to decide to lend him a hand just now, when he has publicly exposed them as envious traitors.

[El jefe de Wagner estalla contra el Kremlin y anuncia la retirada de sus tropas de Bakhmut]

Even doing it to save the furniture, the Russian army would face the same dilemma that we mentioned before: Prigozhin is convinced that they do not send him ammunition because they do not want to – “the arsenals are full,” he says in his controversial video-, but it is not at all clear that this is so. Most likely, Prigozhin is not receiving the promised ammunition because it is not available or because it is being used in Svatove, Kreminna, Kupiansk, Avdiivka, Vuhledar… The Kremlin has to choose and it is choosing however it can, knowing that the entire front could collapse.

And it is that the news coming from Ukraine is anything but encouraging for the invading army. In the East, progress is small but steady. Apart from a possible counterattack on Bakhmut, which should not take long, north-east of Lugansk and south-east of Donetsk are clearly under threat. Precision strikes on refineries and fuel depots will not aid orderly withdrawals or urgent replacements. Paint in disarray at any timein the only hope that the trenches they have dug all over the front will somehow stop the western tanks, which is quite unlikely since we are not in 1916.

Mass evacuations in Zaporizhia

It is impossible to control an army of about two hundred thousand men, with an open front of thousand three hundred kilometers while the bosses throw the stuff at each other’s heads. Completely impossible. At the time, Ukraine’s decision to resist in Bakhmut and Bakhmut was harshly criticized, especially by the United States and its press. has ended up being a mousetrap for the Russian army. The concentration of men in a single city allowed the stabilization of the rest of the front and the precariousness of the south, from which excellent news also comes for Ukraine.

The announcement this Friday by the Russian authorities to evacuate northern Zaporizhia –including the cities of Tokmak and Kajovka, which we have been talking about for days – seems like the prelude to a military withdrawal. Suffice it to say that if Ukraine succeeds cross the Dnieper and seize these two cities and the Energodar nuclear power plant, the southern front will fall like a house of cards. These are all hypotheses, of course, but once the Ukrainian army consolidated its positions at Vasilivka, it would have the possibility to advance in three directions: Melitopol, Berdiansk and Mariupol. Russia cannot stop all three advances. Something will have to be invented if he wants to defend the Crimean peninsula.

[El Grupo Wagner ya presiona en África para crear una “confederación” de países antioccidentales]

The announcement may also imply the opposite: an escalation in the war, but what type? Blow up the Energodar nuclear power plant, which is four hundred kilometers from Russian soil? Any such game would end up affecting both the troops deployed in the area and the Russian citizens themselves who inhabit the east of the country and the occupied Crimean peninsula. Regarding the capacity of the regular troops assigned to that area, it is impossible to make a proper judgment. What we know invites us to think that they are almost all reservists and mobilized from the second wave. If they don’t have ammunition in the middle of Donbas, it’s hard to think that they will have it in Kherson.

In short, heBoth fronts are in danger for Russia while in the Kremlin they play little planes. There is no sign of leadership or organization. Nothing close to coordination on the battlefield. Everyone acts on their own with no one to supervise. While Zelensky visits the front and supports each of the measures of his generals Zaluzhnyi and Sirski, Putin has barely set foot in Ukraine three times in a year and he shows no signs of being the commander-in-chief his country needs. The war has been his business, and if he doesn’t work out, his internal leadership will be seriously questioned.