The leader of Vladimir Putin’s “private army” unleashed an astonishing attack on Russian defence chiefs on Tuesday, accusing them of trying to destroy his mercenary force.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, alleged that the country’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov were depriving his fighters of munitions.
“There is simply direct opposition going on,” Prigozhin said in a voice message posted on his Telegram channel. He said it was “an attempt to destroy the Wagner”.
He hit out shortly before Putin was due to make a speech setting out aims for the second year of his invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian president’s state of the nation address was a day after Joe Biden walked the streets of Kyiv promising to stand with Ukraine as long as it takes.
Following his surprise visit to Kyiv, the US president travelled to Poland and on Tuesday will give a speech on how the United States has helped rally the world to support Ukraine and stress American support for NATO’s eastern flank.
China, which in public has remained neutral despite signing a “no limits” friendship pact with Russia weeks before the invasion, said on Tuesday it was “deeply worried” that the Ukraine conflict could spiral out of control.
Mr Biden, in his trademark aviator sunglasses, and President Volodymyr Zelensky, in green battle fatigues, walked side-by-side to a gold-domed cathedral in Kyiv on a bright winter Monday morning pierced by the sound of air raid sirens.
“When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. But he was dead wrong,” Mr Biden said.
“The cost that Ukraine has had to pay is extraordinarily high. Sacrifices have been far too great. ... We know that there will be difficult days and weeks and years ahead.”
Outside the cathedral, burned-out Russian tanks stand as a symbol of Moscow’s failed assault on the capital at the outset of its invasion, which began on February 24 last year. Its forces swiftly reached Kyiv’s ramparts - only to be turned back by unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Since then, Russia’s war has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers on both sides, cities have been reduced to rubble, and millions of refugees have fled. Russia says it has annexed nearly a fifth of Ukraine, while the West has pledged tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv.
“This visit of the US president to Ukraine, the first for 15 years, is the most important visit in the entire history of Ukraine-US relations,” Mr Zelensky said.
Putin has ordered his troops to advance from a string of locations along the frontline as he gears up for a spring offensive.
Some of the fiercest fighting is around the town of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk province, where Wagner forces are believed to have had more success than the regular Russian army in seizing limited amounts of territory.
However, Putin’s forces are thought to have suffered very heavy losses, with Britain estimating up to 200,000 Russian casualties and as many as 60,000 killed.
Ukrainian troops have also been hit by high casualties, with more than 40,000 civilians reported to have been killed, often in indiscriminate Russian artillery shelling and air strikes.
