"The additional demoralisation of Russian soldiers and additional doubts among the Russian generals, who have been demonstrably humiliated, will worsen the quality of the defence somewhat." Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential official, told Reuters the turmoil would deal a blow to the morale of Russian troops. "Any chaos behind the enemy lines works in our interests," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.īut Kyiv officials caution that even without its crack Wagner fighters, Russia still maintains a vast army inside Ukraine and is able to recruit more soldiers. He had even challenged the rationale for the war. Prigozhin, once personally close to Putin and whose fighters played a prominent role in Russia's offensives in the east, had made many blistering verbal attacks on Russia's defence minister Sergei Shoigu and top military brass over the weeks. No further details of the deal are known. The Kremlin, a day after accusing Prigozhin of leading the mutiny, said he would be allowed to move to Belarus without facing charges in return for calling off his forces from hurtling towards Moscow. officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said much remained unclear, including why Russian forces did not do more to halt Wagner's advance. We saw those resources and they weren't substantial.Essentially, they don't have much force left apart from what they have at the front right now," he said. "They started to pool resources in order to stop them. The apparent ease with which Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary forces barrelled hundreds of kilometres towards Moscow from Russia's south facing little resistance was striking, Zagorodniuk said. Since Putin sent his forces into Ukraine in February 2022 in what he called a "special military operation" Western officials put the death toll in the tens of thousands. "Remember the concept of the 'forever war' that was in the press? I think they will have to rethink that."Ī war stretching many more months and possibly years would inevitably mean more deaths and wounded on each side. "I think clearly they're not in a safe space regarding the endless continuation of the war," Andriy Zagorodniuk, Ukraine's defence minister from 2019 to 2020, told Reuters. It revealed that Russian reserve forces were so thin they struggled to respond to the threat. But current and former officials in Kyiv say the mutiny offered a startling glimpse into the strain the Russian political system is under.
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