Prigozhin won`t be allowed to withdraw his mercenaries from Bakhmut – military expert Kovalenko

Oleksandr Kovalenko, Ukrainian journalist, military and political analyst warned about it in a publication on his Telegram channel.

The expert perceives the current "exit" of the Wagner forces with a degree of skepticism.

He explains that there are about 4,000 Wagner fighters in Bakhmut now. Their withdrawal of this number of forces from the city will require some people to replace them. The question arises, where will the command get 4,000 extra troops 

Just the other day in the Belgorod region there was a great performance with a border incursion.

This breakthrough has clearly demonstrated that today, Russia does not have enough resources to cover the border. For this purpose, they urgently redeployed units from the Luhansk region, but even this will not be enough to secure 700 km of the border. 

What happened in the Belgorod region and then the redeployment of the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division only demonstrated how critical the situation is with available human resources. Russian lacks them even to cover their own territories.

And what about Bakhmut? Where are the resources to transfer there from? They cannot be redeployed from Avdiivka, Vuhledar, Kreminna or other sections of the front.

Thus, the withdrawal of the Wagner PMC can end very badly for the Russian forces both in Bakhmut and near Bakhmut. 

And from this Kovalenko draws a simple conclusion – Prigozhin will not be allowed to fully withdraw his mercenaries from the city, but only some of them for the necessary show...

This show aims to portray him as a ‘winner’ who captured Bakhmut and now he retires and takes a direct route to Russia.

Prigozhin is in a hurry to get out of Bakhmut "victorious" so that he can launch another information campaign against Shoigu and Gerasimov in a quieter environment.

“The idea of the "Putin’s chef" is primitively simple, but, again, I do not see the prospect of a complete withdrawal of the Wagner forces. Some of them, and not a small number of them, will have to stay in the city in any case, and everything else is just part of the traditional spectacle of Prigozhin,”  the expert concludes.

• The founder of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, wrote a letter to the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry, in which he announced his intention to withdraw his mercenaries from Bakhmut on May 10

• The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine believes that Wagner's claims on the withdrawal of forces were made to justify the unfulfilled promise to capture Bakhmut by May 9

• The leader of the Russian Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, reported in a video message about the alleged complete occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region

• The founder of Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, wants to withdraw his mercenaries from Bakhmut, as he realizes that they will be defeated there