WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

The head of the Russian private military contractor Wagner claimed Thursday that his forces have started pulling out of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and handing over control to the Russian military, days after he said Wagner troops had captured the ruined city.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal and Wagner’s millionaire owner with longtime links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in a video published on Telegram that the handover would be completed by June 1. Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t confirm this and it wasn’t possible independently to verify whether Wagner’s pullout from the bombed-out city has begun after a nine-month battle that killed tens of thousands of people. Prigozhin said his troops would now rest in camps, repair equipment and await further orders.

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said Thursday that regular Russian troops had replaced Wagner units in the suburbs but that Wagner fighters remained inside the city. Ukrainian forces maintain a foothold in the southwestern outskirts, she said.

Prigozhin’s Bakhmut triumph delivered a badly needed victory for Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has lost momentum and now faces a Ukrainian counteroffensive using advanced weapons that Kyiv’s Western allies have provided.

According to top Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, that counteroffensive is already underway. He said Thursday that it should not be anticipated as a “single event” starting “at a specific hour of a specific day.” Writing on Twitter, Podolyak said that “dozens of different actions to destroy Russian occupation forces” had “already been taking place yesterday, are taking place today and will continue tomorrow.”

Prigozhin has long feuded with the Russian military leadership, dating back to Wagner’s creation in 2014. He has also built a reputation for inflammatory — and often unverifiable — headline-grabbing statements from which he later backtracks. During the 15-month war in Ukraine, he has repeatedly and publicly accused the Russian military leadership of incompetence, failure to properly provision his troops as they spearheaded the battle for Bakhmut, and failure to credit his troops for their successes and sacrifices.

Wagner’s involvement in the capture of Bakhmut has added to Prigozhin’s standing, which he has used to set forth his personal views about the war’s conduct.

“Prigozhin is … using the perception that Wagner is responsible for the capture of Bakhmut to advocate for a preposterous level of influence over the Russian war effort in Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said.

His frequent critical commentary about Russia’s military performance is uncommon in Russia’s tightly controlled political system, in which only Putin can usually air such criticism.

Seth Jones, director of international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Prigozhin appears to be pressuring the Russian Defense Ministry to take a more active role and responsibility in Bakhmut but he questioned whether regular troops are capable of taking over from Wagner.

“If you pull those forces out of Bakhmut, you lose your entire sort of first line of offensive and then defensive operations, because the Russians aren’t going to use — haven’t used -- their seasoned military forces” for major advances, he said. “You don’t want to waste well trained capable forces in areas where they’re likely to get killed. So removing them would almost certainly allow the Ukrainians to retake territory.”

With Russian forces suffering high casualties and their inability to integrate their, forces, he added, they “just they look miserable.”

Nikolai Petrov, senior Russia and Eurasia research fellow at Chatham House, was skeptical about Prigozhin’s claim the Russian military will take over.

“Nobody knows if that will happen,” Petrov said, adding that Prigozhin is a “populist and he’s playing the cards of hatred” against ineffective Russian military commanders.

Earlier this week, Prigozhin again broke with the Kremlin line on Ukraine, saying its goal of demilitarizing the country had backfired, acknowledging Russian troops had killed civilians and agreeing with Western estimates that he lost more than 20,000 men in the battle for Bakhmut.

Meanwhile, Russia unleashed a barrage of Iranian-made Shahed 36 drones against Kyiv in its 12th nighttime air assault on the Ukrainian capital this month but the city’s air defenses shot them all down, Ukrainian authorities said Thursday.

The Kremlin’s forces also launched 30 airstrikes and 39 attacks from multiple rocket launchers, as well as artillery and mortar attacks across Ukraine, the Ukrainian military said.

At least one civilian was killed and 13 others were wounded in Ukraine on Wednesday and overnight, the Ukrainian presidential office said Thursday.

In other developments Thursday:

—Russia attacked a dam on the Vovcha River in Karlivka, 40 kilometres (24 miles) west of Donetsk, destroying it and raising a flooding risk for three villages, Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. The villages might be evacuated, he said on Telegram.

— Russia and Belarus signed a deal formalizing deployment of Russian nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory. Control of the weapons will remain with Moscow. Putin had announced in March that his country planned to deploy tactical, comparatively short-range and small-yield nuclear weapons in Belarus.

— A U.K.-based technology firm says pro-Russia hackers faked the location data to form a giant letter “Z” — a symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine — in the Black Sea. Geollect says location data for commercial ships has been remotely spoofed so vessels near Crimea appear to form a 65-mile (105-kilometer) long “Z” on open-source maritime tracking sites. Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. The false location data increased the risk of collisions, the firm warned.

—A total of 106 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been released in another major exchange with Russia, chief Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak said. The eight officers and 98 soldiers released fought in the battle for Bakhmut. The bodies of two foreigners and a Ukrainian were also returned to Ukraine. Prigozhin posted a video of himself standing next to two wooden coffins, one draped with an American flag and another with a Turkish flag. Prigozhin said the bodies were being handed over to Ukrainian forces and provided the American’s name but the State Department couldn’t confirm it, pending an investigation and due to privacy concerns. Russian officials confirmed the swap, without providing any details on how many Russians were returned.

— The Russian Foreign Ministry announced that five Swedish diplomats are to be expelled from the country. A statement said the decision is a response to Stockholm’s “openly hostile step” to declare five employees of Russian foreign missions in Sweden “personae non grata” in April. Moscow additionally announced its decision to close its consulate in Goteborg in September, as well as its “withdrawal of consent” to the activities of the Swedish consulate in St. Petersburg. Russia and Western countries have often expelled each other’s diplomats since the war began.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Kiev regime must cease to exist – ex-Russian president

There is no doubt that Ukraine has no future in its current form, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday, outlining three possible scenarios for the collapse of its statehood and assessing the risks of renewed conflict in Europe and a global war.

“This conflict will last for long. For decades, probably. This is a new reality,” the former Russian leader, now the vice-chair of the national security council, told journalists upon wrapping his visit to Vietnam earlier this week.

“It is necessary to destroy the very nature of the Nazi government in Kiev,”Medvedev added, claiming that otherwise the conflict could drag on perpetually, with “three years of truce, two years of conflict, rinse and repeat.”

In a Telegram post on Thursday evening, Medvedev elaborated that the collapse of Ukraine’s statehood is inevitable, and could either happen quickly, or through a “relatively slow erosion, with the gradual loss of remaining elements of sovereignty.” He went even further to outline exactly how he believes the “Kiev regime” would cease to exist.

In the first scenario, parts of Western Ukraine will come under control and eventually be annexed by the neighboring European Union states, Medvedev claimed. The remaining “no man’s land” wedged between Russia and the EU protectorate will become the “new Ukraine,” still striving to join NATO and posing a threat to Russia. In that case, he believes, the armed conflict will shortly reignite, likely becoming permanent with a risk of quickly escalating into a full-blown world war.

In the second scenario, Ukraine would get a government-in-exile but de-facto cease to exist, with control over its entire territory split between the EU and Russia. In that case, according to Medvedev, the risk of world war is “moderate,”but the “terrorist activity by Ukrainian neo-Nazis” on the territories annexed by the EU neighbors would drag on.  

Medvedev said he would prefer the third scenario, in which Ukraine’s Western territories voluntarily join their EU neighbors, while the Eastern and some central regions exercise their “right for self-determination sealed in Article 1 of the UN Charter.”

Officials in Moscow have said repeatedly that the root cause of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine stems from decades of Western disregard of Russian national security. Back in 2021, the Kremlin made an attempt to push NATO to negotiate on long-standing political and defense grievances, but was ignored. In late February 2022, Russia launched its military operation to curb the threat, and now calls for a neutral, non-aligned status for a demilitarized and denazified Ukraine, insists Kiev drops its plans to join NATO and the EU and demands Kiev confirms its non-nuclear status.

Medvedev was president of Russia between 2008 and 2012, and then prime minister until 2020. Currently, he serves as the deputy head of the national security council, which is formally chaired by President Vladimir Putin. Despite his prior reputation as a moderate liberal, he has been far more hawkish on Ukraine than the official Kremlin.

** Ukrainian attacks on Russian nuclear plants foiled – FSB

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said it intercepted a Ukrainian saboteur group that was planning a terrorist operation on two nuclear power plants in the country ahead of May 9, when the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany is celebrated.

The suspects were aiming to destroy more than 30 pylons bearing high-voltage lines linked to the nuclear power plants, the FSB announced in a statement on Thursday.

Before being detained, the Ukrainian agents were able to blow up one transmission tower and mine four others on power lines leading to the Leningrad nuclear plant near St. Petersburg, according to the statement.

They also placed improvised explosive devices at pylons connected to the Kalinin nuclear power plant in Tver Region, 350km northwest of Moscow, it added.

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, which according to the FSB was behind the plot, hoped that the sabotage “would cause the shutdown of nuclear reactors, disruption of routine operations of the nuclear power plants, and deliver serious economic and reputational damage to Russia,” the statement claimed.

The FSB said two Ukrainian citizens were arrested, while another, who is believed to be in Belgium, was placed on the wanted list.

The three men were allegedly recruited by Ukrainian intelligence in September last year and underwent training at camps in the Kiev and Nikolaev Regions of Ukraine. They illegally crossed into Russia in Pskov Region from Belarus, which they had entered from Poland, the agency said.

Russian operatives discovered caches prepared by the suspects, containing 36.5kg of C-4 plastic explosives, 61 foreign-made electric detonators, 38 electronic timers and two Makarov pistols with ammunition, the statement read.

Two Russian citizens were also detained on suspicion of providing means of communication and vehicles with fake license plates to the Ukrainian saboteurs, the FSB added.

AP/RT