The notorious Wagner Group is in the crosshairs of not only the Ukrainian army but also the Russian Defense Ministry after their mercenary boss lost the trust of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, once a top Putin ally, is fighting for the survival of his mercenary forces in eastern Ukraine as the battle for Bakhmut rages on after months of intense warfare.
“After the Soledar battle, Yevgeny Prigozhin lost Putin’s trust,” Wagner expert Oleksander Kovalenko told Fox News Digital. “That’s because Soledar was captured by Wagner [private military company] PMC at the cost of colossal casualties.”
“Indeed, the PMCs in Soledar Wagner lost their main backbone and the operation itself was heavily criticized within Russia,” he added.
In this handout picture released Jan. 10, people in military uniforms claiming to be soldiers of the Russian mercenary group known as the Wagner Group and its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin pose for a photograph believed to be in a salt mine located in Soledar, Ukraine, 2023. (Press service of “Concord” / Handout via Portal)
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The battle for Soledar revealed the first significant cracks reported between the mercenary group and the Russian military after the Defense Ministry claimed victory over the salt mining town, just 10 miles north of Bakhmut, in January.
Prigozhin fired back at this claim, accusing the ministry of trying to steal the group’s fame.
The ministry later issued a rare statement calling it a joint effort, but the public spat exposed the real divisions between Putin’s forces.
Kovalenko, a military chief of the information resistance group in Ukraine, which began countering the propaganda after the 2014 Russian invasion, explained that the fact that Wagner forces had been fighting over the Donbass region since the summer months was not a circumstance do the Prigozhin a favor.
“Prigozhin has had a complete monopoly on conducting hostilities in the Bakhmut region since the summer of 2022,” the Wagner expert explained.
Ukrainian soldiers take cover in a trench during Russian shelling near Bakhmut, Ukraine, March 5, 2023. (AP Photo / Libkos)
Kovalenko said Prigozhin’s failure not only cost him recruitment permits and access to weapons provided by the Defense Ministry, but now his forces are being used as “human shields” in the first line of defense for Russian forces.
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Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, along with Russian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, used Wagner’s failure to capture the Bakhmut sector to persuade Putin to return traditional military troops to the area, the Wagner expert said.
Kovalenko’s account of the changing battlefield dynamics in the Bakhmut sector was echoed in a Sunday report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which said the Russian Defense Ministry is now “deliberately trying to force both elite and Wagnerian forces into Bakhmut expended an attempt to weaken Prigozhin and derail his ambitions for greater influence in the Kremlin.
“Considering the fact that now Prigozhin cannot quickly recover the losses of his units, having lost his monopoly on employing prisoners in prisons, the forces of the mercenaries are being exhausted very quickly,” Kovalenko said.
Yevgeny Prigozhin (Sergei Ilnitsky / Pool Photo via AP / File)
Reports have surfaced for months that Russian defense officials were attempting to remove Prigozhin as Putin’s pseudo-adviser, and the mercenary chief became increasingly frustrated and public with his grievances – he even accused Shoigu and Gerasimov of “treason” last month for their failure to do so had provided his men with sufficient weapons.
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“Whether this was a planned destruction of the Wagner PMC is hard to say, but fact [is] The Russian military command uses the Wagnerites as living flesh,” Kovalenko said.
“Prigozhin is currently unable to do anything,” he added. “He can’t fight back.”
A Ukrainian tank fires on Russian positions on the front line near Bakhmut, Ukraine on March 8, 2023. (AP Photo / Evgeniy Maloletka)
According to ISW, Prigozhin threatened to withdraw his Wagner troops from Bakhmut, but it is unclear how this would play out or what it could mean for Prigozhin.
The Washington-based think-tank said it appears that Russia’s defense ministry is currently “prioritising” the elimination” of Wagner forces from the Bakhmut battlefield, which “will likely slow the pace of advances in the region.”
The elimination of the Wagner mercenary forces would also mean even higher casualties among Russian forces, which have already caused significant deaths in the Bakhmut sector – including up to 1,000 deaths in the last week alone, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
A man lays flowers during the funeral of Dmitry Menshikov, a Wagner Group mercenary who was killed during the military conflict in Ukraine, in the Alley of Heroes at a cemetery in Saint Petersburg, Russia, December 24, 2022. ( Portal / Igor Russak)
Western defense officials have repeatedly said that Russia has designated a disproportionate amount of arms and men in the region for little strategic gain – suggesting the Bakhmut battle has become largely symbolic in Moscow’s eyes.
But according to Kovalenko, Russia can still afford to take Wagner troops out of its war effort.
“PMC Wagner is not the only private military company operating in Russia. Now PMC Patriot and PMC Redut – supervised by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation – are gradually gaining popularity,” he said.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Alexei Druzhinin/Pool Photo via AP/File)
Kovalenko explained that Russian officials have tried to expand Moscow’s use of mercenary troops by diversifying the groups in places like Syria, but Prigozhin’s monopoly previously stood in their way.
“Now the Russian military has an opportunity to use its PMCs and advertise them to Putin,” he said, adding that Russia’s use of forced conscription will also allow it to continue sending men to the front lines in Ukraine.