The leader of Russia's Wagner Group has said his forces will leave the ruined Ukrainian city of Bakhmut next week.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said his units were pulling out next Wednesday because they had no ammunition and were likely to die needlessly.
He said: "I declare on behalf of the Wagner fighters, on behalf of the Wagner command, that on May 10, 2023, we are obliged to transfer positions in the settlement of Bakhmut to units of the defence ministry and withdraw the remains of Wagner to logistics camps to lick our wounds.
"I'm pulling Wagner units out of Bakhmut because in the absence of ammunition they're doomed to perish senselessly," added Mr Prigozhin, a catering magnate nicknamed “Putin’s chef”.
Mr Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin both started their careers in business and politics in their native St Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Bakhmut, which had a population of about 70,000 before the war, has been Russia's main target in a winter offensive that yielded scant gains, despite infantry ground combat of an intensity unseen in Europe since the Second World War.
Wagner has been spearheading Russia's attempt to capture the city since last summer, in what has become the longest and bloodiest battle of the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, which is preparing for its own counteroffensive, had appeared likely to abandon Bakhmut at the end of February, but announced in March it would fight on there, saying Russia was taking higher casualties trying to storm the city.
Head of Wagner Group threatens to pull out of Bakhmut
It is not clear if Mr Prigozhin's statement can be taken at face value, as he has frequently posted impulsive comments in the past. Only last week he withdrew one statement he said he had made as "a joke".
This followed an expletive-filled video published early on Friday in which Mr Prigozhin, surrounded by dozens of corpses he said were Wagner fighters, yelled and swore at Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
He said they were to blame for Wagner's losses because they had starved it of ammunition.
In an interview with a Russian blogger late last month, Mr Prigozhin alleged that his force urgently needed 80,000 shells but the Defence Ministry had reduced his supply from 4,000 to 800 shells per day.
Mr Prigozhin is frequently critical of the Russian army's top brass over the issue of ammunition but his level of condemnation and emotive language in recent weeks is unprecedented.
“Wagner has long had a significant artillery advantage in Bakhmut and received preferential support,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute on Twitter.
The tensions are likely a reflection of the Defence Ministry rationing ammunition before an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive because it “has to defend the whole front but Prigozhin only cares about taking Bakhmut”, he said.
The ministry has rejected Mr Prigozhin’s criticism and Mr Shoigu on Wednesday said “sufficient ammunition has already been delivered to the Armed Forces this year to inflict effective fire damage on the enemy”.
Wagner has had boots on the ground in Ukraine since 2014, when it aided separatist forces in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics.
The company is believed to be in command of about 50,000 troops in Ukraine, about 80 per cent of whom were plucked from Russian prisons, having been offered clemency in return for fighting in Ukraine, according to the US National Security Council.
In January, the US formally designated the Wagner Group a transnational criminal organisation, freezing its American assets for helping Russia's military in the Ukraine war.
