He huffed, and he puffed, and he damn near blew his own house down. The way Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man behind the Wagner mercenary force, was forced to walk back his threat to pull out of the fighting for Bakhmut is a reminder of the divided nature of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
Prigozhin has periodically and publicly called out defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov for their alleged back of support for Wagner. But on Friday, he escalated with two expletive-laden videos posted on social media.
In the first, he pointed at the corpses of dead soldiers and bellowed: ‘Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the fuck is our ammunition?’ He continued: ‘You scum sit there in your expensive clubs. Your kids are all getting off on life, recording their little YouTube videos,’ in a dig at Shoigu’s son-in-law, Alexei Stolyarov, a popular fitness blogger.
In the second, he threatened that Wagner would pull out of the contested city of Bakhmut – where they have been at the forefront of the fighting – by 10 May unless the ammunition shortages were addressed, because otherwise his men were ‘doomed to a senseless death’.
To withdraw from the fight would have been treachery in Putin’s eyes
This was more than a little theatrical.
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