Wagner’s Prigozhin Warns He’s Ready to Withdraw from Bakhmut | Hacker News Reader

Wagner’s Prigozhin Warns He’s Ready to Withdraw from Bakhmut

bloomberg.com

20 pointsDocFeind31 comments

I wouldn't take that headline at face value. Prigozhin periodically releases these statements complaining about lack of ammunition, resources, etc. It's a way to jockey for influence and increase political capital. Next week he'll be back to gloating about Wagner group accomplishments and the cycle will continue.

I am not understanding how this is any different than similar complaints from the last few months. Also, any public utterances by someone as high-up as Prigozhin is not based on logistical, but rather political considerations. To really understand what it means would require much more insight than I have into the all of the players and the current power dynamics between them.

He did a similar complaint a few months back too. Seems to have a knack for getting around red tape / corruption by going public.

To be taken with a grain of salt: this guy has one of the most active troll farm. He knows what he's doing.

https://archive.ph/nnEIn

I think he just wants to focus back on Africa since he's deemed a criminal organization since end of January.

The Ukraine war won't last, there's a counter offensive supposedly in the making and he doesn't want to lose face too much.

If the counter offensive is successful, he could claim it was because he wasn't there. And it wouldn't have happened if he had received the resources he wanted.

He is just waiting to retreat before the counter offensive actually starts.

What seems to be significant is the short timeline ( days not weeks). He knows that won't be possible + in a video of him, he mentioned he didn't send the letter "yet", which is counter intuitive according the claimed urgency.

It's still an unwritten story.

There seems to be suggestions that Wagner received ammo: https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1652747002013163529?t=...

If that's true, he's indeed just looking for an excuse to leave.

I thought the Russians controlled most of Bakhmut now?

I don’t understands it’s value though. The city is completely destroyed as far as I can see from all the videos that are coming out from there.

At this point the value is mostly just symbolic. Russians control most of Bakhmut now but Ukrainians still hold a small piece. At the beginning of the war it had some value as a logistics hub but everything of value was destroyed months ago.

The value of Bakhmut is that it is/was defensible and the Russian losses topped Ukraine losses.

There is talk about a 9-1 ratio, but i think a 5-1 ratio to be more real.

Ukraine seems quick to retreat when those ratios are not favorable.

Ofc, this is guessing. There could be more to it, eg. Russians could advance faster if Bakhmut is conquered.

Additionally, it's more useful to fend off the invaders in an already destroyed city instead of letting them advance to another ( probably inhabited and more intact) city.

The Ukrainians are inflicting heavy losses on the Russian side (including Wagner mercenaries) without taking losses that are nearly as heavy. The Russian side are just throwing lots of soldiers and machinery into badly-placed offenses so they’re playing into the Ukrainians’ hands as the Ukrainians continue to degrade their army. The crucial difference is that the Ukrainians, alongside being much more motivated, are being much, much smarter in terms of logistics.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing I highly recommend following Phillips O’Brien on Twitter, who’s a professor of strategic studies at St Andrews university and has been calling things very well since the beginning of the war: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien

Phillips O'Brien? He claims on Twitter Russia is the most likely candidate for blowing up the Nordstream pipeline. He's just a "Security services stenographer".

Who caused that is still an open question that no-one really has the answer to, so I'm not sure why you're so confident. One of the things that makes me trust O'Brien over others is that he generally admits when he's been wrong and openly reviews his past views in light of new evidence.

> The Ukrainians are inflicting heavy losses on the Russian side (including Wagner mercenaries) without taking losses that are nearly as heavy.

Have in mind that

1) These numbers are unreliable (although most likely in Ukrainian’s favour) 2) Numbers are not equal: 10 poorly trained Russian soldiers are not comparable to 1 elite Ukrainian sniper

Both true, but that doesn't mean the central point isn't correct, particularly when it comes to materiel.

> The Ukrainians are inflicting heavy losses on the Russian side (including Wagner mercenaries) without taking losses that are nearly as heavy.

IIRC, the Ukrainian losses are still pretty heavy. Most other countries have advised them to stop squandering resources trying to hold it, because they think that could undermine their spring offensive.

Absolutely. Just because Ukranian losses are less than the Russians certainly doesn’t mean Ukranian losses aren’t considerable.

For the Ukrainians, it's a place to stall and bleed out Russian offensive capability while the Ukrainians their western-trained forces and equipment for the offensive they're planning.

For the Russians, it's a place to achieve concentration of force and use artillery to attrit large numbers of Ukrainian troops, as well as a chance to break Ukrainian defensive lines and capture a major logistical hub - opening the way to advance on Slovyansk-Kramatorsk.

He should be careful, he might find himself hurtling towards the pavement soon.

this is starting to look like a (practically) forever war

both sides seem committed to impossible goals - Russia wants to occupy everything up to the Polish border, Zelensky wants Russia completely pushed back even out of Crimea

both goals seem unrealistic, and both leaders will probably be replaced by new leadership with an even more zealous commitment to the conflict

on some level I feel like the US administration is fine with this...on the most cynical level, a smashed Europe helps preserve US status militarily and economically

Ukraine liberating Crimea, while a stretch goal, is more likely than Russia defeating Ukraine.

Russia conquering Ukraine is now highly unlikely, but defeating Ukraine (essentially by obliterating it) remains very much within Russia's capabilities, unfortunately.

Whether Putin could see such a Pyrrhic victory as his least-bad option under some set of circumstances — and settle for it — is unknown, but the signs aren't particularly good.

Russia no longer has sufficient conventional forces to defeat Ukraine. They just don't have the manpower. The only way they could do it is with nuclear weapons, and it still seems unlikely that Putin would escalate to that extent.

Russia has large airpower equipped with heavy guided bombs (think JDAMs), which it only has started to use seriously due to the depletion of UA's long-range anti-air defenses (old Soviet S300 systems).

The problem is that Western long-range AA systems are exorbitantly expensive (~$1 bln for a Patriot system), take very long time to produce, and the West simply doesn't have it in quantities that could replace the rapidly depleting Soviet systems. Also, those expensive AA missiles get quickly attrited by cheap Iranian drones.

This is because the Western doctrine has always been about gaining air supremacy via airforce (fighter jets + AWACS + long-range air-to-air missiles complex), which UA doesn't have, and the US seems to be reluctant to supply Ukraine with all that — as they publicly say in the fear of escalation, but more likely due to the price tag.

So if that stance doesn't change, Russia would start bombing UA with heavy 1500kg+ munitions all over the place (inflicting very serious damage), and there is really not much UA could do with that, unfortunately.

“We will bomb the enemy into submission” has been tried in the UK, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Vietnam and has never really worked. The civilian population does not blame its leaders, it blames the enemy. And nightly reports of destroyed apartment blocks and murdered women and children is terrible optics for Russia.

You could argue that it didn't work with North Korea as well (as the regime is still there). But in fact the whole country had been bombed to such condition that it simply had no buildings left, it had been totally flattened, ~300k civilians dead. Could happen with Ukraine as well if they couldn't eventually counter the Russian air force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea

And Putin would be totally happy with the destruction of Ukraine if they don't submit. Either outcome is good for him.

No, Russia has a very limited stock of PGMs and is only able to manufacture new ones at a limited rate.

It could be scaled up, as it is a relatively "dumb" technology and everything needed for it could be manufactured within Russia, rendering sanctions ineffective.

What you observe is just the current state, as it takes time to reroute the supply chains disrupted by sanctions and ramp up the production. And I believe they have all the time in the world, as nothing currently threatens their resource extraction and production capabilities. It is a long game.

In theory anything can be scaled up. In practice they aren't having much luck due to the decrepit state of the Russian industrial base. They are also trying to scale up armored vehicles, artillery ammunition, tactical aircraft, air defense systems, etc. Can't scale up everything at once. There are limits to what a country with a relatively small economy can push, even on a wartime footing.

In the mean time the US and other NATO countries are still delivering longer range air defense systems. Even if Russia manages to produce more PGMs it's going to be very risky to use direct attack type weapons. They're going to have to increasingly rely on stand-off weapons which are effective, but which are much more expensive and contain components that are difficult to produce domestically.

But I agree that we should expect an ongoing war of attrition with no clear victory on either side.

> both goals seem unrealistic

Why do you think pushing Russia back from Crimea is unrealistic? It's very difficult, it might take years and we can discuss whether it makes sense at all, but I wouldn't call it unrealistic.

The one thing that is certain is that Ukraine will lie in ruins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com