The paramilitary group Wagner said on Sunday it had “a promise” from Moscow that it would receive more ammunition after threatening to withdraw from Bakhmout in eastern Ukraine amid the prospect of a counter-offensive Ukraine is becoming more pressing with new drone attacks on Crimea.
The Russian administration in the peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 claimed that Ukraine had launched a dozen drones on the port city of Sevastopol, which it said were neutralized by anti-aircraft defense and electronic jamming.
“No infrastructure in the city was damaged,” said Mikhail Razvojayev, the city governor.
The day before, the Russian authorities had announced that they had shot down a Ukrainian ballistic missile over Crimea, an event rarely reported.
Since the summer of 2022, the peninsula has been regularly hit by drone attacks. At the end of April, one of them caused a huge fire in an oil depot in Sevastopol.
It is in this context of an increasingly perceptible threat of a counter-offensive by the Ukrainian forces that the boss of the Wagner group, Evguéni Prigojine, threatened on Friday, in an incendiary video with regard to the high military hierarchy, to withdraw its mercenaries from Bakhmout, the epicenter of the fighting in the east, if they did not receive more ammunition.
“Last night we received an order to fight […]. We promise to give us all the ammunition and armaments we need to continue operations, ”he finally announced on Sunday in an audio message.
Intense shelling
The battle for Bakhmout has been going on since last summer in this locality of limited strategic value, but which has taken on great symbolic weight, especially on the eve of celebrations in Moscow on May 9 of the 1945 Soviet victory over the Nazis, one of the pillars of the militarist narrative of Russian power.
Wagner’s troops launched extremely deadly waves of assaults on Bakhmout, which had been turned into a field of ruins and now, according to Mr. Prigozhin, about 95% controlled by his troops.
But the Ukrainian army always says it defends itself fiercely. “The enemy is not going to change its objectives and is doing everything to control Bakhmout”, commented General Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of the Ukrainian land forces, quoted Sunday by the Ministry of Defense after a visit to the front in the East.
According to Syrsky, Russia has been regrouping its forces in the area in recent days and has stepped up its bombardment with heavy weapons.
“It’s been a month that it’s been difficult […]. There were days when there were 100 injured, and others when there were 50 to 60. […]. It all depends on what happens in Bakhmout,” explained Friday to Agence France-Presse Volodymyr Pihoulevskiï, a 38-year-old surgeon, member of the Ukrainian medical team who somehow treats soldiers injured in this battle.
“We had a lot of losses. We were 124 combatants at the start of the war, we are less than 80”, said Denis, 25, injured in the shoulder, member of a parachute unit.
The IAEA worries
In full fear of a Ukrainian offensive, the Russian occupation authorities announced Friday partial evacuations in 18 occupied localities in the Ukrainian region of Zaporijjia (south).
On Sunday, the head of the local occupation administration, Yevgeny Balitsky, claimed on Telegram that more than 1,500 people had already been evacuated.
These evacuations concern in particular the city of Energodar, where the majority of the employees of the Zaporijjia nuclear power plant live.
But an evacuation of the employees of the nuclear power plant, whose six reactors are stopped, is not currently planned, announced Saturday Yuri Tchernichuk, director of the site appointed by the Russian authorities.
Saturday, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Rafael Grossi, worried about an “increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous” situation around the plant.
The IAEA has once again warned of the risk of a “serious nuclear accident”, even though the plant, occupied by the Russian military, is at the center of an extremely strategic area for the Ukrainian counter-offensive towards Crimea.
Finally, in Russia, the nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin, a fervent supporter of the offensive against Ukraine in which he claimed to be taking part, came out of a coma after having been operated on the day before to treat the injuries caused by the explosion of his car, which killed his traveling companion near Nizhny Novgorod.
In a first message on Telegram, he indicated that he notably had both legs broken, lost consciousness, and only owed his salvation to a combination of circumstances and to the helicopter sent by the local governor to evacuate him quickly.
“Thank you to everyone who prayed, as it would have been impossible to survive such an explosion,” he wrote. “I tell the demons: you will not intimidate anyone. God exists. We will vanquish “.