Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has said he is willing to risk arrest to secure more ammunition for his men – with his point underlined by a grisly clip surfaced on social media of dead bodies strewn across a battlefield. The video, shared by a Telegram account with links to the shadowy mercenary army, shows stacks of corpses – allegedly those of felled Wagner fighters.
During the clip, one unidentified man in a hazmat suit says: “We’re losing our fighters every day: it would be half as much if the military officials were to supply us with weapons and ammunition on time.
“Let us wage this war. Let us defend our country.”
He adds: “We’re sure that you have ammunition somewhere at the warehouses. We badly need it.
“We would greatly appreciate it if you could assist us and help deliver that ammunition.”
Prigozhin, sometimes seen as a potential successor or rival to Putin, has been fiercely critical of his country’s military commanders in the past.
Speaking this week, he said: “As far as regular supplies go, I have knocked on the door of every office in Moscow I know and I will try to do that until the lads get all they need.”
He vowed to carry on doing so “even if they handcuff me at one of those offices and jail me for ‘discrediting the armed forces’,” in a direct reference to Russia’s war censorship laws which make it an offence to criticise what Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation”.
Separately, another Telegram account, also connected to Wagner, shared pictures of Russian tanks destroyed during fierce fighting centred on Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine.
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It comments: “31 (thirty one) units of destroyed armoured vehicles of the 155th Separate Marine Guards Brigade of the Pacific Fleet of the Russian Federation during the assault on Vuhledar.”
In total, 13 T-72B3 tanks, 12 BMP 1/2, 2 MT-LB and 1 IMR were lost, the post explains, adding: “I note that this is about half of the tank battalion, which is part of the brigade.
“The disaster near Belogorivka is completely repeated – the untrained Russian command drives column after column into battle along the same route, without cover by counter-battery artillery and electronic warfare equipment, and Ukrainian artillery, adjusted by UAVs, blows it up over and over again…”
In a scathing assessment of Russian tactics, the post adds: “By the way, the 155th Marine Brigade already suffered heavy losses during the Z-Operation – in November, the Marines turned to the Governor of Primorsky Territory with a message about the loss of up to 300 people killed during the four-day assault on Pavlovka.
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“Then the fighters blamed the losses on the illiterate command in the person of General Muradov and Akhmetov.
“Of course, these ‘respectable people’ remained in their posts.
“If this is not a war crime, then what is a war crime?”