Ukrainian soldiers sit in a medical supply point.
(Photo: dpa)
After months of heavy fighting for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has announced that it will be conquered. Ukraine, on the other hand, rejected the statements made by Prigozhin on Saturday as untrue.
“Today at 12 noon, Bachmut was completely taken,” said the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner in a video. “We have completely taken the entire city, from house to house.” He announced a handover of the city to the Russian military. The Wagner forces withdrew from Bachmut on May 25th.
In his video message, Prigozhin also again attacked the Kremlin and the regular Russian armed forces. “In contrast to what Konashenkov [Anm.: ein Sprecher des russischen Verteidigungsministeriums] said there were no Russian airborne troops to help us,” he reports.
“We helped ourselves,” he adds, while standing in front of about a dozen of his men, Russian flag in hand.
The Ukrainian military declared that Bakhmut was not captured by the Russian side. “That is not true,” said a spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces. “Our units are fighting in Bachmut.” The information cannot be checked independently at the moment.
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Earlier on Saturday, British intelligence reported that Russia was increasing its troops in the area. “In the past four days, Russia has very likely deployed several battalions to reinforce the Bakhmut Front,” the Defense Ministry said in London.
This was a reaction to tactical gains by the Ukrainian defenders on the flanks of the embattled city and to public threats by the Wagner mercenaries to stop fighting there, it said.
Ukraine may have lost the battle for the city.
(Photo: dpa)
Presumably only a few Russian units are available in Ukraine. Therefore, the transfer to the Bakhmut area represents a remarkable commitment by the Russian command, the British ministry emphasized.
Moscow sees Bachmut as “a kind of trophy”
“The Russian leadership is likely to continue to view the capture of Bakhmut as the most important immediate war objective that would allow them to achieve some degree of success in the conflict.”
Also on Saturday, Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesman for Ukraine’s Operations Command East, said Russia was now sending airborne troops and motorized infantry to Bakhmut in addition to Wagner Group mercenaries.
Cherevatyi said that capturing the besieged city remains a top priority for Moscow and would be “a kind of trophy” for Russia’s efforts.
The Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maljar had previously stated that the Russian military had transferred several thousand soldiers to Bakhmut as reinforcements. “The enemy can’t win with quality so they try with quantity,” she wrote on Facebook.
The city of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine has been under a Russian siege since August 1, 2022, for almost 300 days. The battle is one of the longest in world history. A capture of the city, which once had more than 70,000 inhabitants, would have primarily symbolic meaning.
With agency material.
This text first appeared in the Tagesspiegel.
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