For nearly a year, Russia has waged a vicious battle to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, seeking gains after months of embarrassing battlefield setbacks.
Although the city has been essentially razed to the ground, capturing it and ending the longest battle of the war would be a political, if pyrrhic, victory for Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner paramilitary group, whose mercenaries attack on Bakhmut.
For Mr. Prigozhin, conquering the city seems to have become a personal obsession – so much so that one facet of the battle’s legacy will be the bizarre, public feud that began between him, the man once known as “Putin’s chief.” , and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Mr. Prigozhin is an oligarch who made part of his wealth by winning Kremlin catering contracts – hence the nickname ‘chef’. His infamous Wagner mercenary force has exerted influence on behalf of Moscow in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Mozambique, and it is now a vital force fighting on behalf of Russia in Ukraine – although Mr Prigozhin has publicly acknowledged his connection to Wagner alone in September.
He has since built an aggressive social media presence, depicting himself and his armed forces as more ruthless and effective fighters than the Russian military, and denouncing Moscow’s defense bureaucracy — all despite his close relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Prigozhin’s sharp accusations about the competence of the Russian Defense Ministry, coupled with his fighters’ progress in the grueling battle for Bakhmut, transformed him from a once secretive figure into a political power player on the public scene.
The disagreement between Mr Prigozhin and Russian defense officials became increasingly apparent as the anniversary of the war approached in February.
At the time, Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary group lost its ability to replenish its ranks. The sheer number of troops, some of whom were recruited from prisons by Prigozhin, had fueled Wagner’s repeated offensives in Bakhmut. But news of Wagner’s astronomical number of victims spread to the Russian penal colonies, and Mr. Prigozhin announced in early February that he would stop recruiting prisoners, without giving a reason.
Not long after, he targeted figures at the top of Russia’s chain of command, accusing the defense minister and the country’s top general of treason in vitriolic, profanity-laden social media audio messages.
Mr Prigozhin claimed that military officials deliberately withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner fighters in Bakhmut to undermine him, while, he said, Russian forces elsewhere faced failure after failure.
According to a classified US intelligence document leaked online in April, the dispute got so bad that Putin became personally involved, convening Mr. Prigozhin and Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu for a meeting believed to have took place on February 22. “The meeting almost certainly related, at least in part, to Prigozhin’s public allegations and the ensuing tension with Shoygu,” the document says, using an alternate transliteration of the minister’s name.
The public intensity of the dispute has fluctuated since then. Mr. Prigozhin eventually said his fighters in Bakhmut had been given the ammunition they needed, and in April the Russian Defense Ministry made a rare acknowledgment of their cooperation, saying that Russian paratrooper units had hit Wagner’s flanks in the western part of the cover city.
But over the course of just three weeks in May, Mr. Prigozhin again accused the Russian military bureaucracy of starving Wagner troops of the ammunition they needed to fully conquer Bakhmut, this time threatening them out of the city on May 10 to retreat; seemed to return two days later, as he has before, saying this time that he had received satisfying promises of more guns; undermined the Russian army’s claims for a partial “regrouping” of its troops in the city by issuing a “route”; denied a report he offered to betray the locations of the Russian army around Bakhmut if Kiev agreed to withdraw from the area; and stated on Saturday that Bakhmut was completely under Wagner’s control.
Kiev quickly denied the latest claim. In a reflection of how the public feud has exposed fault lines in the typically impenetrable world of the Russian military, Moscow has so far remained silent.