The head of Russia’s Wagner private military group has said that his forces will continue their brutal campaign to capture Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city ruined by one of the longest battles of the war, while warning that the Kremlin needed to more clearly define its military goals as Ukraine prepares to mount a possible counteroffensive.
“First of all, we need to decide where we’re going to or where we come to a halt,” Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group, said in an interview posted to the Telegram messaging network on Thursday. “As soon as this is determined absolutely clearly, then it will be clear when the S.V.O. will end,” he said, using the Russian initials for the Kremlin’s term for the war, the “special military operation.”
As Russia’s invasion pushes into a 14th month, officials on both sides are signaling that fighting will intensify as temperatures warm into the spring. The spokesman for President Biden’s National Security Council said this week that Russia was planning further offensives, while officials in both Kyiv and Moscow have suggested that Ukraine will soon launch a renewed push to reclaim territory lost in the east and south.
Both armies have poured huge resources into Bakhmut, which Russia has failed to conquer despite eight months of fighting. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said on Thursday that Russian forces were “not giving up hope of taking Bakhmut at any cost,” although he said he saw signs that fighters from the Wagner group there were “losing significant strength and becoming exhausted.”
“Very soon,” he said on Telegram, “we will take advantage of this opportunity.”
More advanced weapons from Western allies, including tanks and fighter jets, are beginning to arrive and could help Ukraine go on the attack. But it is not immediately clear whether Ukraine’s exhausted soldiers can swiftly change the course of the fighting in Bakhmut. Kyiv’s forces, too, are believed to have suffered huge numbers of deaths and injuries there in unrelenting Russian bombardments and in defending against waves of near-suicidal assaults by Russian ground troops, including former prisoners recruited by Wagner.
Moscow’s forces have pushed into Bakhmut, and street battles have broken out, with the two armies holed up in abandoned and ruined factories, according to Russian and Ukrainian accounts of the fighting. But Russian forces have been unable to rout Ukrainian troops from the city or to cut off the last roads leading west out of the city, routes that Kyiv’s forces have used to supply and reinforce their defense.
Mr. Prigozhin gave no indication that he would cease Wagner’s effort to capture Bakhmut. “The Bakhmut meat grinder continues,” he said in his comments, pointing to a map in front of him.
But his warning to Kremlin military planners highlighted what even supporters of Russia’s war effort see as one of the biggest problems in how President Vladimir V. Putin is conducting the invasion: He has not specified what Russia’s goals are.
Mr. Prigozhin — the once secretive tycoon whose close personal ties to Mr. Putin helped him amass a fortune before he founded Russia’s best-known mercenary force — has frequently criticized Russian military officials for not providing his fighters, whom he describes as more effective than the regular army, with adequate equipment and support.
At another point in the interview, Mr. Prigozhin seemed to question one of Mr. Putin’s stated reasons for going to war: the false claim that Ukraine was run by “Nazis.” “I don’t know about the denazification of Ukraine,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “Are there Nazis there, or aren’t there? I haven’t crawled around in there.”
He also said that Russia needed to prepare for multiple offensives by Ukraine and urged Russian officials, as he has in the past, to avoid playing down Ukraine’s will to fight.
“They are not running away, they are fighting, they are standing to the death where they have to,” he said of Ukrainian soldiers. “They are behaving with absolute dignity.”
Russian officials appear to be trying increasingly to prepare their own public for a looming offensive by Ukraine. Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s Security Council, said in comments released on Friday that the military was getting ready for Ukraine to go on the attack.
“They are preparing for various offensive operations — everyone knows that,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Our General Staff is taking this into account and preparing its solutions.”
