Heavy fighting continued Saturday in the besieged city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, and a Ukrainian military spokesman said Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s tirade about an acute ammunition shortage was “a complete bluff,” CNN reported.

“We control a part of the city. Nothing has changed there, the positional war continues. The enemy has not made much progress,” Serhiy Cherevaty, the spokesman for the eastern group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told CNN on Saturday.

Cherevati also dismissed claims by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner’s mercenaries, that their ammunition supplies were running low, saying Russian forces had fired thousands of shells along the front line in the past 24 hours.

“Now they produce more than 20,000 shells per day. Therefore (Prygozhin’s remark about the acute shortage of ammunition) is a complete bluff,” said the Ukrainian official.

Wagner threatened to leave Bakhmut

Recently, the leader of the Russian mercenary company Wagner filmed himself next to dozens of the bodies of his soldiers, criticizing the Russian military leadership more than ever for insufficient ammunition. Later, he announced that from May 10, “Wagner” would withdraw from the battle for Bakhmut “to lick its wounds.”

Then, on Saturday, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that he would hand over the positions of his mercenaries of the “Wagner” PMC in the city of Bakhmut to the “Kadyrovs” – the forces of the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, subordinate to the Russian Armed Forces.

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