Sunday Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, he said in an audio message on Telegram that his men could stay and fight in Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that Russia has been trying to conquer for weeks, suffering huge losses.
Prigozhin said so two days after announcing that the mercenaries would withdraw from the city on May 10, claiming his group would not have enough weapons and ammunition to continue fighting, and blaming the Russian government very aggressively.
In Sunday’s message, Prigozhin said that the Russian government had promised the group “enough ammunition and weapons to continue military operations”, hinting that the mercenaries should therefore continue fighting in Bakhmut even after May 10.
The announcement of the withdrawal had been widely commented both for the exceptional nature of such explicit criticisms of the Russian government, and for the fact that the military operations in Bakhmut are managed almost entirely by the Wagner group and that therefore an abandonment of the city by the mercenaries could seriously undermine Russia’s chances of conquering it. However, there were many doubts about Prigozhin’s real intentions, who is known for often making utterances which he then does not follow up on.