On Tuesday, Yevgeny Prigozhin went further than he ever had in his public standoff with Russia’s military leaders, claiming the defense minister and the country’s most senior general were starving his private army of ammunition.
He then accused them of treason for weakening his fighters at a crucial moment in the war in Ukraine.
By Thursday, the acrimonious and very public dispute appeared to have subsided, with Mr. Prigozhin saying his mercenary group, Wagner, now had the ammunition they desperately needed. In the opaque world of the Russian military, it is impossible to know if his troops got the ammunition, or if the Kremlin lost patience and told him to play nice.
Either way, the discord between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian Defense Ministry undermined the theme of unity emphasized by President Vladimir V. Putin in highly publicized speeches this week, as he rallied his nation for a long war. They also raised new questions about Russia’s ability to sustain a drawn-out war against an increasingly well-armed Ukraine.
What just happened?
Tensions between Mr. Prigozhin and Russia’s military command have been building for months, getting ever more bitter as Wagner became the central fighting force for the city of Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s east.
Those tensions escalated to a new level on Tuesday, when Mr. Prigozhin, in a series of caustic audio messages, claimed the military command was deliberately withholding supplies to undermine Wagner.
The Defense Ministry picked up the gauntlet. In a rare public response that evening, the ministry denied the accusations, and indirectly accused Mr. Prigozhin of aiding the enemy by damaging the unity of Russian forces.
Mr. Prigozhin then escalated the dispute further, calling the ministry’s response “an attempt to hide their crimes.” On Wednesday, he published a graphic video showing rows of dozens of corpses, which he said were Wagner fighters who died because of ammunition shortages. The video could not be independently verified.
On Thursday, Mr. Prigozhin lowered the tone as suddenly as he raised it, claiming on Telegram that the problem has been solved.
“We were told that the loading of ammunition has begun,” he said, referring to the warehouses. “From the guys, thank you.”
What does it mean for Bakhmut?
Mr. Prigozhin’s flurry of polemical, often shocking social media activity comes as Wagner and regular military units are storming Bakhmut from three sides and trying to end one of the war’s bloodiest and longest battles.
Ukraine this month barred civilians from entering the city, in what some military analysts interpreted as a prelude to withdrawal. The Ukrainian defenders, however, have maintained stiff resistance, forcing Wagner to rely on costly frontal assaults to inch its way toward the city center.
These assaults continued this week even as Mr. Prigozhin denounced ammunition shortages, according to Russian military bloggers, making it difficult to estimate the effect of whatever supply problems there were.
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“Ammo hunger is clearly impacting the fighting, both for Wagnerites and ordinary servicemen,” said Ruslan Leviev, a Russian military analyst for the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group of analysts. “It is difficult to tell how serious that hunger is right now.”
How did the dispute emerge?
After operating for years in secrecy, Mr. Prigozhin stepped on the public scene last summer as the Russian invasion of Ukraine sputtered. He skillfully used social media, an ecosystem of troll farms and online propaganda outlets to paint a picture of himself as a straight-talking patriot who was prepared to achieve Russia’s military objectives at any cost.
In the process, he presented himself as an antidote to Russia’s staff generals and military bureaucrats, who had failed to capture Ukraine’s capital. He portrayed Wagner as an effective, tight-knit force, and his allies contrasted the group’s advance on Bakhmut with the failures of the Russian Army elsewhere.
The group gained strength as Mr. Prigozhin began recruiting from Russian prisons, a move that could have been made possible through the personal involvement of Mr. Putin, his longtime ally.
American officials estimated in December that Wagner had about 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, including 10,000 experienced volunteers and 40,0000 convicts. Ukrainian officials, Russian rights activists and Wagner defectors said many former prisoners have since died in near-suicidal attacks meant to wear down Ukrainian defenses.
For months, Wagner-affiliated social media accounts have accused Russia’s senior military command of sapping their forces’ strength through costly operational and planning mistakes. Mr. Prigozhin had supported those accusations in oblique comments, but in January his tone became increasingly direct and confrontational.
He accused the Defense Ministry of ignoring Wagner’s contribution to the capture of Soledar, a town north of Bakhmut. Soon after, he said the military establishment had prevented him from recruiting convicts, in an effort to destroy Wagner’s “offensive potential.”
Prison activists say the Defense Ministry has started directly enlisting in prisons, although there has been no official confirmation of such recruiting.
Some analysts said Mr. Prigozhin has turned Russia’s unpopular commanders into targets to boost his public profile, a sign of his growing political ambitions — and that he has suffered a backlash as other commanders try to lessen his power. Others have attributed the tensions to the usual rivalries for Mr. Putin’s favor among officials and businessmen.
“There’s clearly jealousy at play,” said Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst for the independent Russian news outlet Meduza.
Why does it matter?
While the dispute appears to have subsided, it put the spotlight on Russian ammunition stocks amid signs that the Kremlin is making moves for the biggest offensive since the initial invasion wave.
Mr. Prigozhin’s pleas suggest that Russia is struggling to produce enough shells to sustain military operations that have dragged on for longer then the government expected, said one Russian researcher close to the Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics. For the foreseeable future, the country’s only solution is to import them from nearby nations, he said.
His assessment broadly echoed analyses by Western military experts.
Some pro-war Russian commentators said Mr. Prigozhin’s complaints show that Wagner and other Russian private military companies, or P.M.C.s, now have to ration scarce supplies like regular army units.
“The problem is not that P.M.C.s have stopped receiving ammunition, but that they have started receiving them like everyone else,” Aleksandr Khodakovsky, a pro-Russian separatist commander in Ukraine, wrote on Telegram on Wednesday.
