The boss of the Russian Wagner paramilitary group estimated that the city of Bakhmutthe epicenter of the fighting in eastern Ukraine, will be conquered by “March or April”, and he attributed the slow progress of Russia to the “monstrous military bureaucracy”.
“I think it will be in March or April. To take Bakhmut, we need to cut all supply routes, it is a significant task”, Yevgeny Prigozhin said in videos posted on Telegram on Wednesday night.
“I think that we would have taken Bakhmut before the New Year if it weren’t for this monstrous military bureaucracyand if they did not hinder us every day, ”Prigozhin criticized, in another video on the Telegram channel of his press service.
“Progress is not going as fast as we would like,” he acknowledged in one of the messages posted on Telegram.
According to Prigozhin, the fact that the Wagner group can no longer recruit prisoners to go to the front in exchange for amnesty is a “bleed” for his organization.
“At one point, the number of units will drop and, consequently, the volume of tasks that we want to execute” too, he added.
The paramilitary organization has been leading the offensive against Bakhmut for months. It has recruited a good number of detainees to go to fight in the Ukraine. On February 9, Prigozhin announced that such recruitment had ceased.
Wagner claims to have captured ground without the help of the regular army, which has led to friction between Wagner and Russian military commanders, which Prigozhin criticized for being mired in a “monstrous” bureaucracy. The paramilitary group played a key role in January in the seizure of the nearby Ukrainian town of Soledar, an achievement that was promptly questioned by the Russian Defense Ministry and sparked a clash with Prigozhin, who accused the ministry of wanting to “steal their victory.” .
Once discreet, Wagner’s boss was long an inseparable ally of the Kremlin, for whom he carried out some commissions.
For years he denied it, but in the end he publicly acknowledged being the founder of the Wagner group, whose paramilitaries have been seen in the Middle East and Africa.
He also admitted to having participated in Russian meddling in US elections and having created a “troll farm” to carry out propaganda and disinformation campaigns on the internet.
Prigozhin himself was imprisoned in Russia for nearly a decade, at the end of the Soviet era, and was later a hot dog vendor in St. Petersburg, before rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons as a hotelier.
(With information from AFP)
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Source-www.infobae.com