Last month, Vladimir Putin took a trip to the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to tour one of the more contested pieces of territory in the ongoing war. The visit was mostly a photo op to show the supposed advances being made by the Russian military, supported by large numbers of civilian soldiers from the Wagner Group. The city had already been largely reduced to rubble by that point with only a small number of civilian residents remaining in the area. The owner of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had boasted that they would fully retake Bakhmut by May 9th, the anniversary of Russia’s defeat of the Nazis in World War II. But they have made little progress since then, with the fighting settling into a stalemate and massive casualties being sustained on both sides. Now Prigozhin is placing the blame on Russia’s inability to give him enough ammunition to keep his soldiers in the fight and he’s threatening to pull his forces out of the area. (AP)

The owner of Russia’s Wagner Group military contractor threatened Friday to pull his troops out of the protracted battle for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut next week, accusing Russia’s military command of starving his forces of ammunition and causing them heavy losses.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a notorious millionaire with longtime links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, claimed that Wagner had planned to capture Bakhmut by May 9. That day is a major Russian holiday marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

But, Prigozhin said, his force hasn’t received enough artillery ammunition supplies from the Russian military since Monday. Known for his bluster, Prigozhin has previously made unverifiable claims and made threats he hasn’t carried out.

Prigozhin is definitely turning the situation into a public relations campaign at this point. He released a video to the media yesterday showing him angrily chastising Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and demanding more ammunition. He staged the shot in front of a pile of uniformed bodies, claiming that they were all of his soldiers who had died in a single day and declaring that their “blood was still warm.”

The fact that Russia has had to rely so heavily on mercenaries like the Wagner Group and untrained conscripts speaks to how much weaker the Russian army was than the West had long assumed. And while the number of casualties on both sides has been brutal, the Ukrainians have put up an impressive fight in trying to retake the annexed territory. This may still turn out to all be bluster on the part of Yevgeny Prigozhin, but if he really does pull his forces out, the Russian position will be severely weakened and Putin could yet lose control of the region.

What does seem to be very real, however, is the lack of ammunition currently hindering both sides. The war in Ukraine is burning through the global supply of bullets and rockets faster than civilian manufacturers can replace them. This is reminiscent of some battlefields in Europe during World War II when soldiers told horror stories of both sides running out of bullets and resorting to the use of bayonets in bloody hand-to-hand fighting.

If Prigozhin’s video begins making the rounds in Russia, particularly if he pulls the Wagner Group out of the fighting, it could severely weaken public support for the war back home. Vladimir Putin has been attempting to paint a rosy picture of the Russian military’s progress on the home front, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult. There are still suspicions that the recent drone attack on the Kremlin was launched by one of Putin’s own people in an assassination attempt. (I personally still think it was the Ukrainians, but nobody is taking credit for it yet.) There is still no clear path leading to an end to the war by Ukraine or NATO, but defectors inside the Kremlin could pull it off if they somehow manage to remove Putin from power. That outcome may turn out to be the best scenario we could hope for at this point. But concerns will remain as to whether or not his replacement will turn out to be even worse.