Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has ordered that any volunteer detachment, including Wagner Group mercenaries, must join the Russian Armed Forces and, therefore, sign contracts with the Defense Ministry to legalize their status. The minister’s order establishes that “contracts must be signed before July 1, which will give volunteer formations the necessary legal status, create common approaches to organizing comprehensive support and fulfilling their tasks.”
In a new challenge, the head of the Wagner Group mercenaries, Evgueni Prigozhin, said yesterday that his men they will not sign “never” no type of contract with Shoigu: «Wagner is absolutely and completely subordinate to the interests of the Russian Federation and directly to the Commander in Chief (the president Vladimir Putin)”, Prigozhin wrote yesterday on his Telegram channel. “Most of the military units are not as efficient as the Wagners, and it is because Shoigu is not capable of managing military formations normally,” Prigozhin maintained in yet another setback to the Defense Minister, with whom he has had a relationship for months. irreconcilable confrontation.
Faced with the information disseminated by Kiev about the advances of its troops in Zaporizhia, in the area of Bakhmut and in the vicinity of the city of Donetsk, the Russian Ministry of Defense denies that such an offensive is being successful and assures that the Ukrainian attacks are being repelled. “During the last 24 hours, the Ukrainian armed forces have carried out unsuccessful attempts to advance in the southern directions of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Donetsk,” Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said yesterday.
The fighting continues
According to his report, Russian troops with the support of aviation “defeated” several Ukrainian brigades in the area of the towns of Novodonetskoye, Neskuchnoye, Storozhevoye and in the Oktiabr state farm of the Donetsk People’s Republic. “In the direction of Zaporizhia, the decisive actions of the defending units, air strikes and artillery fire from the Russian force group Vostok repelled three enemy attacks from the directions of the Novodanilovka, Malaya Tokmachka and Novopokrovka settlements in one day” , all of them in the Zaporizhia region, Konashenkov said, adding that “the column of armored vehicles of the 128th mountain assault brigade of the Ukrainian troops, advancing south, was also defeated.”
The report also assured that the Russian forces are facing the Ukrainian offensives in the area of Marinka and Avdivka, both in the Donetsk region, where it reported “eight attacks repelled” and “no penetration of our defenses.” According to Konashenkov, there were also attacks in the Kupiansk area, in the Kharkov region, thus confirming that the Ukrainian Army is counterattacking on a broad front.
Attacks against western tanks
Shortly after Konashenkov’s appearance, his boss, the Russian Defense Minister, handed out medals to soldiers who have distinguished themselves during the current Special Military Operation, words with which the Russian authorities refer to the war in Ukraine. During the ceremony, special mention was made of the destruction of four German Leopard tanks and five American Bradley armored vehicles “while repelling the Ukrainian counter-offensive.” In the information on Russian public television, Shoigu appears awarding the gold star of Hero of Russia, the highest military honor in Russia, to the military who said they had shot down these Western tanks and vehicles.
The Russian Defense Ministry also reported yesterday that a Ukrainian attack on one of its warships was averted while on patrol in the Black Sea. “The Ukrainian armed forces tried unsuccessfully to attack the Priazovie ship of the Black Sea Fleet,” the military note states, which specifies that “six unmanned vessels” were used against the Russian ship during the night when “it was carrying out the mission to ensure the safety of Turkish gas pipelines Turkish Stream and Blue Stream, in the south-eastern area of the Black Sea», infrastructures that supply Russian gas to Turkey. The six Ukrainian maritime drones, according to the report, were destroyed. Ukraine has repeatedly used such weapons against Russian Navy ships.
Returning once again to the possibility that a negotiating process could be opened with Ukraine to end the hostilities, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told the television journalist yesterday in an interview, Pavel Zarubin, that “now there is no basis, not even a weak one, to undertake any kind of dialogue” with kyiv. He blamed the Ukrainian authorities for a lack of will in this regard, suggesting that there is a willingness on the part of Moscow, something that none of the countries, including China, that are trying to provide a diplomatic solution to the conflict have been able to verify. The main stumbling block remains Russia’s efforts to keep the occupied Ukrainian territories under its sovereignty, something that kyiv considers completely inadmissible.
