Likely, but there's all kinds of internal politics going on too - reportedly Prigozhin, Kadyrov and Surovikin schemed to take over the MOD and were outmanoeuvred. It's also been reported that his Wagner Group can't recruit from prisons anymore, and that the MOD will be potentially taking over, but in addition volunteers in prisons are getting harder to find after people discovered the fate of the first tranches of them. Wagner's tactics secured Soledar and parts of eastern Bakhmut, and may end up securing Bakhmut, but at serious cost and it looks like Wagner Group is now heading towards being a spent force, and Prigozhin is out of favour for the moment.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Sat Feb 11, 2023 5:35 pmFrom the Guardian liveblog.Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, has said it could take two years for Russia to fully control the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, two regions whose capture Moscow has stated as a key goal of the war.
In a video published on Friday with the Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov, reported by Reuters, Prigozhin said:
“As far as I understand, we need to close off the Donetsk and Luhansk republics and in principle that will suit everyone for now.”
“That could take one and a half to two years,” he said.
In September, Vladimir Putin formally annexed the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine, along with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, in defiance of international law and condemned by UN member states as illegal.
“If we have to get to the Dnipro, then it will take about three years,” Prigozhin added, referring to a larger area that would extend to the vast Dnipro River that runs roughly north to south, bisecting Ukraine.
Prigozhin does not speak for the Russian military but his comments provide a rare insight into Russian expectations of the conflict, from the head of a group at the centre of some of its fiercest fighting.
Looks like he’s trying to manage expectations.
The war certainly can go on for a long time, though, regardless of who has the upper hand, and it makes sense for Western nations to work with Ukraine to work out what shortcuts can be taken - in light of that news of the UK's plans to provide training and presumably Typhoons and, even more significantly, the potential for the relatively quick transfer of long range missiles is very welcome.