05/20/2023 4:24 pm (act. 05/20/2023 06:07 pm)
According to Wagner’s team, they took Bachmut ©APA/AFP/TELEGRAM/
According to its own statements, the Russian mercenary group Wagner has taken full control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been disputed for weeks. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin shared this in a video on Saturday. Ukraine disagreed. “This is not true,” said a spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces. “Our units are fighting in Bachmut.”
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry describes the situation in Bakhmut as critical. “Intense fighting in Bakhmut. The situation is critical,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram. Ukrainian forces controlled some industrial and infrastructure facilities in the contested area.
“Today, at noon, Bakhmut has been completely captured,” Prigozhin said at the beginning of the video. The head of the mercenary group announced that the city would be handed over to the Russian military. Wagner’s forces will withdraw from the city starting May 25, he says.
Prigozhin repeatedly complained about the lack of support from the Russian armed forces and threatened to abandon his positions. In his video, distributed on Saturday, he again attacked Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov. They are responsible for the fact that five times more Russian fighters died than necessary.
Ukraine does not want to give up the eastern city, which has been contested since the end of the summer, to prevent Russian troops from invading the countryside. The city is the main part of the defense line between the cities of Siversk and Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, established after the Russian conquest of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk. If the city fell, the route to the main cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk would be open to Russian troops. This would bring a complete conquest of Russia’s planned Donetsk region closer.
Ukraine has been fending off the Russian incursion for more than 14 months. The city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which once had a population of over 70,000, has been the focus of fighting for months. The battle for the city, which is now symbolically important, is the bloodiest and longest in the war so far.