happy days...rumors that Wagner is backing down just add to Russian casualties and confusion.
The Battle of Rostov in'43 was the first effective counter-attack by the Soviet Bolshevik forces versus the anti-bolshevik forces.
"Mercenaries from the Wagner Group of embittered warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin — some of them speeding along a highway to Moscow — on Saturday looked set for imminent clashes with troops loyal to President Vladimir Putin, who warned the rebellion risked pushing Russia into a civil war.
Furious over the Kremlin’s bungled invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin seized key strategic footholds in southern Russian on Saturday — most significantly the major city of Rostov-on-Don — while an unclear number of his forces were making a dash up the main highway to the capital. Russian government forces also appeared to shell the southern city of Voronezh on Saturday in an attempt to combat the Wagner insurrection, which is snowballing into one of the gravest threats to Putin’s 25-year rule.
It is far from clear how close Wagner’s troops are to Moscow but the governor of Lipetsk, some 400 kilometers south of the capital, has reported the mercenary convoy passing through, and authorities there said they were carving ditches in the road with diggers to slow Prigozhin’s men. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin warned “a counter-terrorist operation has been declared in Moscow. The situation is complicated,” and added that Monday would not be a regular working day, telling people to avoid traveling round the city.
Footage posted online of the roadblocks supposed to slow Wagner looked hastily improvized, with a light military presence, mainly composed of civilian vehicles. Jay Truesdale, a former American diplomat who served in both Russia and Ukraine, said Moscow was ill-equipped to cope with a major insurgency. “Russia hasn’t been able to deal with the immediate threat from Wagner because the best members of its armed forces are deployed, or suffered casualties in Ukraine,” he told POLITICO.