A Ukrainian commander in the eastern city of Bakhmut said his unit faces “constant” shelling and they have seen no evidence of the Russian ammunition shortage that Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has claimed.
“The enemy is trying to carry out these attacks 24/7… We have not noticed that they have a shortage of ammunition, as they claim. I think it’s the opposite. The intensity of the shelling is only increasing,” Ihor Shepetin, a battalion commander in the territorial defense brigade, told Ukrainian TV.
Prigozhin, whose Wagner troops have spearheaded the fight to take the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, has repeatedly claimed his fighters lack ammunition. Last week, he said they would withdraw from the area – a threat he has now apparently backtracked from.
Shepetin said Prigozhin’s statements were an effort to “mislead” the Ukrainian military in the face of his own “enormous losses”.
“I think that the enemy is already desperate. He is using all means at his disposal to try to drive our defense forces out of Bakhmut. But the enemy is not succeeding and will not succeed,” Shepetin said, adding that the Ukrainians were not in danger of being encircled and – while they had “some logistical problems” – were still able to evacuate the wounded and receive supplies of ammunition.
Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern grouping of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, agreed, saying in a separate TV interview that “the Russians have no shortage of ammunition. This is absolutely not true.” He added that Ukrainian positions had been shelled more than four hundred times in the past 24 hours and enemy troops were using “more than 25,000 shells per day” on average around the eastern cities of Bakhmut, Lyman and Kupyansk.
“He [Prigozhin] comes up with this nonsense about the shell crisis. However, his main problem is the constant annihilation of personnel by our defense forces. And hence, he is unable to replenish personnel because he cannot recruit people from prisons,” Cherevatyi said.
Cherevatyi claimed that Russia had taken some 20,000 casualties in the Bakhmut area over the past nine months because of Wagner’s “meat grinder” tactic of fighting.
