Wagner Group forces launched attacks from several directions on the city of Bakhmut, though analysts said seizing it would yield little strategic value.
After weeks of unexpected battlefield setbacks for Russia, the war in Ukraine on Sunday delivered another surprise: the emergence of a former Russian convict and onetime hot-dog seller as perhaps the Kremlin’s best hope for a small, face-saving military victory.
With occupying Russian forces at peril in the strategic southern city of Kherson, troops with a private military force controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a convicted thief and longtime associate of Russia’s president, Vladimir. V. Putin, advanced on the Ukrainian-held city of Bakhmut in the east of the country.
The city, under attack by Russia for months, has little strategic value, but a victory there for Moscow would break its humiliating run of defeats — and give a boost to the political fortunes of Mr. Prigozhin, a shadowy businessman who served nine years in a Soviet prison for robbery. Mr. Prigozhin used to be mocked as “Putin’s cook” because of his business interests in catering but is now a growing force in Russia’s labyrinthine power politics.
Though steadfastly loyal to Mr. Putin in his public statements, Mr. Prigozhin has cut an increasingly assertive and independent figure, denouncing military commanders appointed by the Kremlin and, on a recent visit to Russia’s Kursk region, meeting with local businessmen about the organization of an ill-defined people’s militia outside the regular military command.
One of the commanders he criticized, Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin, the head of Russia’s Central Military District, has since left his post, according to the Russian state news media, and been replaced, at least temporarily, by Maj. Gen. Alexander Linkov. The top commanders of the eastern, southern and western military districts have all been replaced since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Under fire over military bungling in Ukraine from Mr. Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the southern Russian region of Chechnya, Russia’s Defense Ministry last month appointed a new overall commander for its forces in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin.
Britain’s military intelligence agency, in its latest daily update on the war in Ukraine, said on Sunday that the “dismissals represent a pattern of blame against senior Russian military commanders for failures to achieve Russian objectives on the battlefield.” The frequent military reshuffling, it added, “is in part likely an attempt to insulate and deflect blame from Russian senior leadership at home.”