03/03/2023 22:08 (act. 03/03/2023 22:10)
The city, which has been at war for months, is about to fall ©APA/AFPTV
Russian troops continued their assault on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on Friday. “The enemy is still trying to encircle the city,” the Ukrainian general staff said in its daily evening situation report. A series of attacks on various focal points around Bakhmut were repulsed by the Ukrainian defenders. The Russian military has been trying to capture the city for weeks.
The head of the Russian Wagner mercenary force deployed there, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Friday that his fighters had almost completely surrounded the town. A single road to the west would still be open to Ukrainians. A Wagner fighter told Russian news agency Ria Novosty that Ukrainian troops had already blown up almost all bridges over the Bakhmutska River. The information could not be independently verified.
On Thursday, the Wagner group managed to advance to the river that separates the east and west zones of the city. Now, the Ukrainian withdrawal from the eastern part of the city appears to be in full swing. A video posted to social media on Friday shows a railway bridge being blown up in the north of the city. Prigozhin asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to withdraw his troops from the city.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian side insists that the city will continue to be defended. “Yes, it is difficult and difficult, but we know how to proceed,” Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov told the RBK-Ukraine portal. A Ukrainian reconnaissance unit working with drones has been ordered to withdraw, according to its commander.
The Ukrainian military previously announced that it had repelled several Russian attacks in the Bakhmut area in the east of the country. In the last 24 hours, more than 85 attacks on the five main sectors of the front have been repulsed, the Ukrainian military general staff said on Friday morning.
In an interview with the newspaper “Bild”, the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Oleksiy Resnikov, did not rule out that Bakhmut could fall into Russian hands. But that would only mean “they won a small victory,” he said. After losing the cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk in 2022, Bakhmut forms part of Ukraine’s next line of defense in Donbass.
With the loss of Bakhmut, Ukraine would have to pull back the defensive line. “You can clearly see that the Ukrainians have started to establish new positions on the heights of four to five kilometers west of Bakhmut,” Markus Reisner, military analyst and commander of the guard of the Austrian Armed Forces, told the daily newspaper “Kurier” (Thursday). -fair). ). The next major line of defense is about 20 kilometers west of Bakhmut, where several small towns are located, Reisner said.
The Ukrainian leadership has said Bakhmut in the Donetsk region has limited strategic value but wants to thwart Russian advances. Russia, on the other hand, hopes that the capture of Bakhmut will be an important step towards conquering the rest of the surrounding industrial area of Donbass, which consists of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The city, which once had 74,000 inhabitants, is now largely destroyed. According to authorities’ estimates, around 5,000 civilians still live in Bakhmut.