Night fell on Moscow on Thursday as Russian social networks in the front line of fire began firing alarms like machine guns. Pro-Russian bloggers claimed that the Ukrainian army had just launched its long-awaited counter-offensive and was now attacking them from all sides: crossing the Dnieper to advance into Crimea, while encircling Bakhmut and imprisoning thousands of soldiers. it attacked the neighboring town of Soledar and even prepared to cross the border, rumored to be the Kremlin’s Great Red Line, to capture Russia’s Belgorod region. “The statements made by individual Telegram channels about defense failures at various points of the contact line do not correspond to reality,” the Ministry of Defense announced almost midnight.
The next morning, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, denied the official information, and hours later the Russian army admitted with a euphemism that they were in Bakhmut, the devastated city that has become the epicenter of terror in recent months was, “reformed” had war.
One of the first signs of panic came from Ukraine’s northern border. “It began to spread on the Internet that troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the Kharkov region were on their way to Belgorod. We expressly point out that this information does not correspond to reality. “Ukrainian vehicles are only moving within Kharkiv, no offensive is planned,” was the somewhat reassuring message from local news channel Dzhest Belgorod given speculation about the arrival of the Ukrainian military at its gates. However, the rumors merely pointed to a troop buildup in the area and not an alleged attack at the time.
The information about the fights is mostly contradictory and difficult to verify only after some time. The Russian Defense Ministry has claimed to have stopped an attack on a 95-kilometer front on Soledar, a town very close to Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, which involved a thousand soldiers and 40 Ukrainian armored cars. However, Kiev has offered a completely different version. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his troops had been attacked by the Russians in the area and had not only been able to stop them, but in some cases “pushed them back”.
The Ukrainian President stressed on Thursday that his army needed “a little more time” to prepare its counter-offensive and that the waiting time in Moscow was getting longer. The greatest evidence of the tensions suffered by Russian officers was this Friday’s confrontation, another standoff between the high command of their armed forces and the owner of the mercenary company, Wagner. Prigozhin denied a victorious Defense Ministry report on Bakhmut’s defense and ironically ironized the military inexperience of his chief, Sergei Shoigu. The businessman won this new verbal battle: Hours later, Moscow recognized with a play on words that it had given in to the Ukrainian advance.
“The enemy launched a series of successful counterattacks on the flanks of the Wagner Group, where units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are stationed,” Prigozhin denounced in the morning after the Defense Ministry claimed it had repelled three attacks. Ukrainians in the city. Hours later, defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated that the troops supposedly covering Wagner on that front had “regrouped.”
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“Units of the Russian Southern Group, due to the favorable conditions provided by the Berkhovskoye reservoir, occupied another line on the Maloilinovsk front. They have shown their courage by repelling the enemy’s attacks,” the defense spokesman said. Prighosin corrected his words and promised to retaliate with more details in the future: “Unfortunately, that’s called a retreat, not a regrouping.”
Wagner’s owner has again insulted the defense minister, albeit in a more subtle way than in recent days, when he called Shoigu and his chief of staff Valery Gerasimov “sluts” for allegedly not supplying him with ammunition. “Taking into account the difficult operational situation, as well as your many years of experience in combat operations, I ask you to come to the Bakhmut settlement and independently assess the current situation,” suggested Prigozhin Shoigu, with a veiled criticism of his no military career Vladimir Putin, former head of the Ministry of Emergencies , appointed Shoigu defense minister in 2012, thanks to the blind loyalty he has shown to him since the current president’s emergence on the Russian political scene in the 1990s.
“panic is death”
One of the pro-war and ultra-nationalist channels with the greatest appeal in Russia due to its 1.3 million followers, WarGonzo has criticized those who expressed fear of the apparent start of the Ukrainian offensive and those who despised the attacks relatively small. “Panic is dead,” warned one of the Telegram site’s founders, Semion Pegov, while urging Thursday’s fighting “to be taken seriously.”
“The enemy is making progress. Somewhere more, somewhere less, but it will have an impact on the further development of events. The offensive did not start today or yesterday, the enemy is looking for our weak points and trying to hit them,” the blogger warned late Thursday evening.
The entire front stretches for around a thousand kilometers and the Russian high command is faced with the dilemma of which areas to protect with its exhausted army in the face of the looming Ukrainian offensive, which in turn sows further doubts in Moscow with hits everywhere. Igor Girkin, the Russian Domestic Intelligence Service (FSB) officer who rushed more Russian soldiers into the Donbass in 2014 and spearheaded the early stages of that war, has also joined the speculation.
“I have predicted that the main offensive will take place in Zaporizhia – Russia’s only land connection to Crimea – and auxiliary forces in Kherson and (possibly) Donetsk. And they can cause diversionary attacks [las regiones rusas de] Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk will capture settlements and prompt Russian forces to attack them,” predicted the soldier, one of the most critical representatives of the Kremlin’s warfare. “I’d be happy to be wrong, but I have little optimism,” he said.
While the Russian troops entrench themselves, they look for reinforcements in the rear in order to avoid being forced to mobilize again. The governor of Primorsky Krai Oleg Kozhemyako has presented a new Law on Assistance to Participants in the Special Operation. Authorities will give priority to housing orphans who volunteer. Russian legislation stipulates that the government must give these people a roof over their heads when they turn 18. However, around 288,000 orphans are currently on the waiting list.
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