Russian Unease Over Ukraine War Grows Amid Attacks and Leadership Rifts

Author - JOHN GREEK

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NYT WORLD: Russian Unease Over Ukraine War Grows Amid Attacks and Leadership Rifts
By Neil MacFarquhar
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 5, 2023 at 03:00AM

With a Ukrainian offensive looming, explosions in Crimea and inside Russia have rattled Moscow, sparking bureaucratic infighting among military commanders.

With Ukraine stepping up attacks deep inside Russian-controlled territory, there were new signs on Friday of disarray and unease among Russia’s military and political leadership as they brace for a looming Ukrainian offensive, for which their forces may be ill-prepared. The latest manifestation of those tensions came from Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, who used what he said were the newly bloody corpses of his fighters as the backdrop for another expletive-laced rant against the top military command. Not for the first time, he threatened to pull his fighters out of the long-embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut if the Ministry of Defense did not provide more ammunition. That was just one of a series of events that contributed to a sense that the war effort, and by extension the country, was adrift, even as Russia prepares to observe the biggest military holiday of the year next Tuesday. Two explosions rocked the Kremlin in the middle of the night on Wednesday, in what the Russians claimed was a failed drone attack by Ukraine. Denying the accusation, Ukraine said Russia might have done it to try to muster domestic support for a faltering war effort. No matter the culprit, symbolically it seemed to many to signal Kremlin weakness.