A shadowy paramilitary outfit is making gains for Russia in eastern Ukraine — and, in the process, apparently exacerbating tensions back in Moscow, where military chiefs are hesitant to give credit to the influential Kremlin insider responsible for the effort.
The Wagner Group, as the militia is known, is operated by the businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Frustrated by months of military setbacks, Putin tacitly allowed Prigozhin last year toThe recent military successes of Wagner fighters have stoked suspicions that Prigozhin is hoping to assert himself politically at a time when few other Kremlin advisers can credibly point to victories of their own.
To be sure, Prigozhin’s successes are modest. But as far as the Kremlin is concerned, at least they are not defeats that have to be explained away with convoluted and unconvincing conspiracy theories by state television propagandists., north of the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine.
“Incremental progress” in the Bakhmut area has come “at a great cost,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Yahoo News at a press briefing Wednesday. But considering that Russia had expected to conquer the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in a matter of days when it first invaded in February last year, any progress at all is significant.
Although the Wagner Group has long operated in Syria and Africa, where it bolsters despotic regimes, its commitment to Ukraine appears to signal an acknowledgment that traditional means of waging war have failed, if largely because Russia’s moribund military has been in desperate need of reform for decades., with the State Department accusing him of forging"a trail of lies and human rights abuses.
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