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The Ukrainian government has claimed that Russian forces are trying “with all their might” to seize control of the town of Bakhmut before May 9, a particularly symbolic date because Russia commemorates Victory Day over the Nazis and which would fit with the withdrawal threat launched this Friday by the founder of the Wagner Group, Yevgeni Prighozin.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar has stated on her Telegram account that Russian forces have begun to replace Wagner’s mercenaries with paratrooper assault brigades. “Our combatants do not allow the enemy to break through the line of defense”, she assured her, in a message in which she also reported the alleged destruction of ammunition by mercenaries.
Precisely the lack of ammunition has led Prighozin to his most forceful criticism against the Russian military elite, captured in a video in which, along with alleged corpses of his group, he charges insults against the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the Army General Staff, Valeri Gerasimov, about the situation at the front in Ukraine.
Prighozin has even set May 10 as the deadline to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut, a strategic town located in the Donetsk region, to avoid “senseless deaths.” “On May 10 we will have to hand over our positions in Bakhmut to Defense Ministry units and retreat to the rear to lick our wounds,” he said in a statement.
