A threat by the owner of private Russian military company Wagner on Friday to withdraw his fighters from the battle to seize an eastern Ukrainian city is another flareup in his dispute with Russia's regular military over credit and tactics in the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy entrepreneur with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has led the push to jump-start Russia’s stalemated offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province. He threatened to pull out his soldiers from the city of Bakhmut next week, citing high casualties and ammunition shortages.
Wagner was first spotted in action in eastern Ukraine soon after a separatist conflict erupted there in April 2014, weeks after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Prigozhin has reportedly used Wagner’s deployment to Syria and African countries to secure lucrative mining contracts. U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.
A 2017 video posted online showed a group of armed people, reported to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting his head before mutilating and burning his body. Russian authorities ignored requests by the media and rights activists to investigate.
The U.S. estimates Wagner has about 50,000 personnel fighting in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 of the convicts the company enlisted. Troops purported to be Wagner contractors on the front line in Ukraine recorded a video in which they showered the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, with curses for the alleged failure to provide ammunition.
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