Yevgeny Prigojine deplores the slow Russian progress in Ukraine, while the battle for Bakhmout is still raging. Long discreet, he no longer hides being in conflict with the Russian military hierarchy.
The boss of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner has ruled that Bakhmout, epicenter of the fighting in eastern Ukraine, will not be conquered by Moscow before “March or April”, believing that the slow Russian progress was due to the “monstrous military bureaucracy”. .
“I think it’s March or April. To take Bakhmout, you have to cut off all supply routes,” Yevgeni Prigojine said in a video posted overnight from Wednesday to Thursday on the Telegram WarGonzo channel.
“I think we would have taken Bakhmout if it weren’t for this monstrous military bureaucracy, and if we weren’t being put in the way every day,” Yevgeni Prigojine lambasted in another video on the channel. Telegram from its press service.
Conflict with the Russian military hierarchy
According to him, the fact that Wagner can no longer recruit prisoners to go to the front in exchange for an amnesty constitutes a “bleed” for his organization.
“At some point, the number of units will drop and consequently the volume of tasks we want to perform” too, he added.
The private paramilitary organization Wagner has been leading the offensive against Bakhmout for months at the cost of very heavy losses. It recruited large numbers of prisoners to go and fight in Ukraine.
Evguéni Prigojine announced on February 9 that this recruitment had ceased and he no longer hides being in conflict with the Russian military hierarchy. Formerly discreet, the boss of Wagner has long been an invisible ally of the Kremlin of which he executed some of his base works.
After years of denials, he publicly admitted to being the founder of Wagner, whose paramilitaries were seen in the Middle East and Africa, admitted to participating in Russian interference in US elections and created a “troll farm ” to carry out propaganda and disinformation campaigns on the Internet.
