Friday will be the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As you might expect there will be all sorts of commentary about that anniversary this week. Vladimir Putin seems to be trying to get out ahead of all of that with a major speech Tuesday aimed at giving an update on the “special military operation.”

Putin will set out his latest thinking in a speech to members of both houses of parliament and to military commanders and soldiers nearly one year after he sent troops into Ukraine, a decision that triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the depths of the Cold War.

“At such a crucial and very complicated juncture in our development, our lives, everyone is waiting for a message in the hope of hearing an assessment of what is happening, an assessment of the special military operation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television…

Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny accused Putin on Monday of destroying Russia’s future for the sake of his own personal ambitions.

“He wants to go down in history as ‘the conqueror tsar’.”

The speech is set for 9 am GMT which is 1am California time, so we’ll have to wait for tomorrow to find out what he said. I suspect he’ll say that Russia is fighting the entire west and that’s why he doesn’t have much to show for the past year. The question is why he thinks the next 6 months or a year will be any better. What I don’t expect him to say is that he’s launching a new mobilization in order to finally see some progress. He’s probably not looking to create another exodus of young men out of the country this week even if he needs the men. And that brings me to another thing he probably won’t mention. Last Friday, US officials released an estimate of the number of fighters Wagner and the military have lost so far.

Over 30,000 mercenaries fighting for the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group have been killed or injured since the Ukraine war began, US officials say.

White House spokesman John Kirby said the group had suffered significant losses in recent weeks, with about 9,000 fighters killed in action.

Wagner has recruited heavily in Russian prisons, and Mr Kirby said most casualties were untrained convicts…

Elsewhere, UK intelligence officials have estimated that Russian regular forces and Wagner troops may have suffered between 175,000-200,000 casualties – including 40,000-60,000 deaths.

There continues to be some strangeness between the Russian military and the Wagner group. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner, is now saying someone is withholding ammunition from his fighters:

In a seven-minute long audio message published on Monday by his press service, an apparently angry and emotional Prigozhin said he was required to “apologise and obey” in order to secure ammunition for his troops.

Speaking at times with a raised voice and occasionally swearing, he said: “I’m unable to solve this problem despite all my connections and contacts.”…

“Those who interfere with us trying to win this war are absolutely, directly working for the enemy”, he said.

It’s not clear who the “enemy” is but Wagner mercenaries on the ground are echoing his complaints:

Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries are begging Moscow to provide them with ammunition for the fight in Ukraine, according to footage shared on social media this week.

In one video, in which four figures claim to be part of an artillery unit from Wagner, a man ticks off a list of ammunition the unit lacks, and appeals directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense for support.

“Every day we carry out difficult combat tasks, covering assault groups. At the moment, we are completely cut off from the ammunition supply,” the supposed Wagner fighters state in a video shared on Twitter. “We appeal to our colleagues and friends from the Ministry of Defense. We are confident there is this ammunition somewhere in the stockpiles, and we need them acutely… We will do the work for you—help us with ammunition.”

There have been hints that Wagner has worn out its welcome at the Kremlin and that some even see Prigozhin as a potential threat to Putin’s power. So the problem getting ammunition for his mercenaries is probably connected to that. Stay tuned and we’ll have more on Putin’s framing of his first year in Ukraine tomorrow.