Pressure mounts on Wagner as Russia claims Bakhmut

Russia’s Wagner Group claims to have made a significant advance in the grinding war in Ukraine by capturing Bakhmut, while Ukraine insists its troops still hold the razed Eastern city.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the private mercenary group, posted a video from Bakhmut in which he said the city – the scene of intense fighting for months – was now “legally Russian”, although he admitted that Ukrainian forces were still concentrated in Western districts.

Drone footage shared by Wagner shows its flag and the Russian tricolour flapping in the wind on a pile of rubble that used to be city hall.

While Bakhmut doesn’t have huge strategic significance, it’s become highly symbolic in a grinding war where both sides are in desperate need of a breakthrough.

The Wagner Group is the shadowy organisation propping up Vladimir Putin’s war effort. It’s thought to comprise of 50,000 fighters, many drawn from Russian jails and used as brutally effective canon-fodder on the frontline.  

The fight against Wagner isn’t confined to the battlefield, however. According to the Institute for the Study of War think tank, the assassination of Russian military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, over the weekend may reveal “escalating internal conflicts” with the Kremlin involving Prigozhin and the group.

An enthusiastic supporter of the war in Ukraine, Tatarsky (real name Maxim Fomin) was killed in St. Petersburg when a bust of himself he had been handed at an event exploded. It happened at a café believed to be owned by Prigozhin.

The ISW said: “Fomin had attended another event earlier in the day without incident, so it appears that the attack was deliberately staged in a space owned by Prigozhin.

“Fomin’s assassination may have been intended as a warning to Prigozhin, who has been increasingly questioning core Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine and even obliquely signalling an interest in the Russian presidency, whether in competition with Putin or as his successor.” 

The group is also under pressure on the legal front. Jason McCue, senior partner at McCue Jury and Partners, has described how his firm is waging “lawfare” against Wagner.

With a flagship civil lawsuit in Britain in the pipeline, McCue is aiming to prove that Wagner is a terrorist organisation. The strategic goal, he told Al Jazeera, is to “frustrate and tie up and cause havoc for the Russian war machine”.

Wagner has no known assets in the UK. But the idea is to transfer the judgement of a British court to countries in which they do, “seizing bank accounts in Switzerland, mining operations in Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic, or gold-smuggling operations in Sudan” – all suspected Wagner assets.
 
Bakhmut may have fallen into Russian hands, but life is getting more difficult for the firm far away from the frontline.

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