“Where’s the damn ammo?”
Prigozhin rages against the military leadership in front of Wagner corpses
05/05/2023, 07:55 am
Wagner boss Prigoschin is not known for soft tones. His latest video still surpasses all previous ones. He stands in front of the bodies of numerous killed mercenaries and roars his frustration at the lack of ammunition. The target of his attack is the Russian military leadership.
A new video by the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has caused further escalation within Russia. In the evening darkness, Prigozhin stands in front of the bodies of around 30 Wagner fighters who were killed, he says. They fell during the day. After the camera pans over the corpses, he begins his angry speech.
He attacked the Russian military leadership in Moscow in an unprecedented manner. Garnished with numerous insults, he literally shouts into the camera that the dead are fathers and sons. Those who would refuse ammunition to the Wagner group were to blame for her death. Prigozhin says about 70 percent of the ammunition his fighters actually need is missing. A few days ago he explained in a video on his Telegram channel that the Wagner group would need around 300 tons of artillery ammunition every day.
Then Prigozhin names those he believes to be responsible for the lack of ammunition: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valeri Gerasimov, who has been the supreme commander of Russian troops in Ukraine since January. He yells, “Where’s the damn ammo?” He then accuses the two men of sitting in exclusive clubs and their children enjoying their lives. According to Prigozhin, Shoigu and Gerasimov appear to believe that they are in control of the lives of the Wagner fighters, that they can simply decide how to divide the ammunition. He complains that his fighters are getting five times less ammunition. What the comparison refers to is not clear. The fighters in the background came as volunteers and are now dying so that the military leadership would get a free pass, according to the Wagner boss.
With the video, the dispute between Prigozhin and Moscow, which has been going on for months, reaches a new high point. The Wagner boss has long complained about the lack of support from the Russian military. He kept asking for more ammo. He said that otherwise further territorial gains would hardly be possible, repeatedly referring to the high losses that would be necessary. In a recent Telegram video, he said that 86 fighters lost their lives for advancing 120 meters in the town of Bakhmut.
However, the Wagner group relies on a tactic that accepts an enormously high number of victims. Again and again only lightly armed fighters were sent in groups, and without major support from armored vehicles, in the direction of Ukrainian positions in order to expose them. Many mercenaries fell in the process. The artillery could then fire on the Ukrainian positions and then advance further Wagner fighters. Because of this approach, Western experts assume that among the Wagner fighters almost every second person will lose their life in combat. If that’s true, the value would be higher than in other combat units. Pictures of numerous graves of Wagner mercenaries on social media support the assumed losses. Already in early April, Prigozhin admitted that the cemetery where he was located continued to grow.
Moscow is torn about the Wagner group. On the one hand, it is the only military unit that has been able to show any major gains in territory in recent months – Russian soldiers are making little progress on all other sectors of the front. On the other hand, due to the military successes, Prigozhin appeared more and more demanding, attacked the Russian military, and indirectly even the Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The political and military leadership could not let this sit, and reacted. For example, the Wagner Group was forbidden to recruit more fighters from Russian prisons. Prigozhin had previously recruited tens of thousands of fighters there, and experts estimated that the number of Wagner fighters had grown to around 50,000 in the meantime. Due to the lack of a pool of other fighters, Prigozhin decided to open numerous recruiting offices in Russia.
However, Prigozhin was not sparing with criticism, repeatedly demanding more ammunition for his fighters. Most recently, he oracled that the upcoming Ukrainian counter-offensive could be a tragedy for Russia. About a week ago he even threatened to withdraw from Bachmut due to the high losses.