The head of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has threatened to withdraw his troops from the embattled city of Bakhmut in Ukraine amid high casualty rates, while a fuel depot on Crimea caught fire after a probable drone attack.
"Every day we have stacks of thousands of bodies that we put in coffins and send home," Prigozhin said in an interview with Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov published on Saturday.
Losses were five times higher than necessary because of the lack of artillery ammunition, Prigozhin said.
The Wagner chief said he has written to Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu asking for supplies as soon as possible. "If the ammunition deficit is not replenished, we are forced - in order not to run like cowardly rats afterwards - to either withdraw or die," the 61-year-old asserted.
Prigozhin said he would probably be forced to withdraw some of his troops, but warned that this would mean that the front would collapse elsewhere.
There has been fighting over Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine for months. Casualties are high on both sides. The Ukrainian defenders control only a small area in the west of the city.
Earlier in the day, a fuel tank caught fire in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol following what was thought to have been a drone attack, the Russian-installed Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on Telegram, according to Russia's TASS news agency.
Ukrainian military intelligence said later that 10 oil tanks were destroyed, without stating that Kiev had assumed responsibility for the attack, however. At the same time, authority spokesman Andriy Yusov stressed that such explosions will continue.
The total volume of the tanks had been "about 40,000 tons," said Yusov. "This is God's punishment especially for the killed citizens in Uman, among whom are five children," he said, referring to a Russian missile attack in the central Ukrainian city the day before.
According to him, the fuel depot is used by the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Crimea.
Russia's Razvozhayev said an area of 1,000 square metres had been engulfed in flames.
There was no immediate information on casualties.
Razvozhayev said later that the fire triggered "the most severe of all possible" alarm levels - level four. Civilian infrastructure was not threatened, he wrote on Telegram.
Eighteen firefighting units were being deployed to fight the fire, Razvozhayev wrote. Due to the size of the blaze, he said it could take several hours to extinguish.
"The fire does not affect fuel supplies for Sevastopol. These reserves were not used for petrol station deliveries," he wrote - suggesting that the fuel depot was being used for military purposes.
Ukraine has repeatedly declared its intention to retake the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014 to international outcry.
Violent drone incidents have occurred several times there in the course of Russia's current 14-month-old all-out invasion, sometimes causing severe damage, injuries and deaths.
Meanwhile on the mainland, the latest Russian missile strikes that reportedly killed at least 25 civilians in Ukraine indicate a new and more indiscriminate offensive strategy, according to British intelligence agencies.
"The wave involved fewer missiles than those over the winter and was unlikely to have been targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure," the Ministry of Defence in London tweeted on Saturday.
There was a realistic possibility that Russia had tried on Friday to attack Ukrainian reserve units and recently delivered military supplies, according to the ministry's latest intelligence update.
In doing so, Russia was operating an "inefficient targeting process" and "prioritising perceived military necessity over preventing collateral damage, including civilian deaths," it added.
The attack was the largest use of cruise missiles since early March and indicated "a departure in Russia's use of long-range strikes."
Fewer missiles were used than in the winter, when Russia mainly targeted Ukrainian infrastructure, according to the ministry, which has published daily intelligence updates on the war's progress since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Ukrainian military gave the total number of missiles fired overnight at Ukraine as 23, of which 21 were shot down, along with two drones.
Ten residential blocks were hit in the central city of Uman in the Cherkasy region, while a woman and child also reportedly died in the eastern city of Dnipro during night-time shelling.
"The country-invader never ceases to prove that the main goal of this war is terror and the destruction of Ukrainians and everything Ukrainian," President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.
The Russian Defence Ministry, meanwhile, wrote on Telegram: "Safely on target."
