Wagner chief says it will take two years to capture entire Donbas

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Kremlin’s Wagner mercenary group, has said that it will take up to two years for Russian forces to capture the Donbas region, writes James Kilner.

His comments are a rare admission by a senior Kremlin-linked official that the Russian military will be in Ukraine for several years.

“If we need to reach the Dnieper (Dnipro river), that’ll take three years,” Mr Prigozhin said in the interview with Semyon Pegov, a pro-war milblogger. 

“If we want to close down the whole of the DPR and LPR, then we need to work for at least one-and-a-half to two years,” he said, referring to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas, which the Kremlin illegally annexed last year.

Russian forces have launched a general push along the frontline, with the Vuhledar emerging as a critical hot spot in the fight for Donetsk province.

The town would give both sides, the Ukrainian forces who hold the urban center, and the Russians positioned in the suburbs, a tactical upper hand in the greater battle for the Donbas region.