Russia’s Wagner Group claims to have taken Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine this week, but the government in Kiev says it intends to retake the devastated city after encircling it.
“We continue to advance on the flanks in the suburbs of Bakhmut and are actually close to capturing the city in a tactical encirclement,” said Supreme Ground Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi, as Ukrainian forces added that they had 4 square kilometers (1.5 sq mi ) would have recaptured. of the territory
The battle for Bakhmut has become a growing focus of the war, now in its 65th week, as Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to seize the Donetsk region, home to the city with a pre-war population of 70,000, and neighboring Luhansk given priority.
Ukraine says it used a grueling road war in Bakhmut to attract Russian forces from other parts of the frontline and inflict heavy casualties. In the past two weeks, his forces have also launched a series of flanking operations around the city to reclaim land.
“Ukrainian counterattacks near Bakhmut notably eliminated the threat of Russian encirclement of Ukrainian forces at Bakhmut, forcing Russian troops to allocate scarce military resources to defend against a limited and localized offensive, as the Ukrainian command likely intended,” he said the Washington-based report, the Institute for War Research, announced on Friday.
(Al Jazeera)
The following day, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group and its mercenary troops, said they had captured Bakhmut. Russia’s Defense Ministry followed with a nightly announcement that it had captured the city – and, as it had for months, was competing for credit on the Eastern Front.
The online news service Meduza also said Bakhmut was practically captured. The “disputed” area consists only of “a dozen high-rise buildings, schools, a kindergarten and a few garages at the end of Tchaikovsky Street,” it said.
But Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said defenders still controlled an area of ”industrial and infrastructure facilities” on the southwestern outskirts of the city, known as the “aircraft district” because of a monument to a MiG-17 fighter jet.
Maliar said Ukrainian troops remained in the neighborhood on Tuesday. A day earlier, Eastern Forces spokesman Serhiy Cherevaty said Ukrainian soldiers had been conducting flanking maneuvers north and south of the city and advancing 200 to 400 meters (220 to 440 yards), suggesting the battle was far from over.
Russia has allocated enormous resources to the fight.
On Saturday, Maliar said Moscow had sent several thousand reinforcements to Bakhmut. Cherevaty said these were airborne, motorized rifle and special forces. British military intelligence assumed it could be multiple battalions, underscoring the importance of the battle to the Kremlin.
“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,” reads an analysis by British intelligence.
Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence, said Sunday: “The fact that the enemy is forced to transfer additional reserves to continue the operation on Bakhmut generally indicates the failure of their offensive actions.”
The Wagner group was the brunt of the fighting at Bakhmut, and Prigozhin threatened withdrawal in early May, an action the Defense Ministry said would be punished as high treason. But on Sunday Prigozhin said his soldiers would evacuate the theater starting Thursday.
invasion of Belgorod
Further northeast, meanwhile, two pro-Ukrainian and anti-Kremlin militias carried out a rare incursion into Russian territory on Monday.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Russia’s Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine, said the Federal Security Service, the Border Service and the National Guard were fighting “a sabotage and reconnaissance group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.
The Ukrainian government denied any involvement, but members of the two groups – identified as the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Legion of Freedom of Russia – claimed responsibility.
“Residents of Russia! We are Russians, just like you,” reads a video released by the Freedom of Russia Legion. “The only difference between us is that we no longer wanted to justify the actions of the criminals under Russia’s power and have taken up arms to defend our freedom and yours.” Putin’s Russia is rotten with corruption, censorship and oppression. “
Military reporters said the groups captured the settlement of Kozinka near the border and attacked two others.
Yusov identified the fighters as Russian partisans who “started an armed struggle against Vladimir Putin’s criminal regime”. He said they could create a “certain security zone in the border regions of Russia on the border with Ukraine” from which Ukrainian towns and settlements would be shelled.
It was not clear what role Ukraine had played in arming the groups. The Russian Ministry of Defense also said nothing about the origin of their weapons. Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak said Ukraine “is watching events in Russia’s Belgorod region with interest … but has no direct relation to them.”
On Tuesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had pushed back forces into Ukraine, killing more than 70 of its fighters. Airstrikes, artillery fire and units covering the state border of the Western Military District were affected, the ministry said.
F-16s get the green light
Separately, Western arms sales to Ukraine hit another turning point this week when US President Joe Biden backed the Allies’ joint training of Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets ahead of a decision on making the planes available — an urgent request Of Ukraine.
On the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, Zelenskyy assured Biden that the planes would not be used for attacks on Russian territory.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the F-16s are not part of an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive that is expected to begin soon.
“We have come to a point where it is time to look to the future and say, ‘What will Ukraine need as part of a future military force to be able to deter and defend against Russian aggression in the future ?’ Fourth-generation F-16 fighter jets are part of that mix,” Sullivan said at a White House briefing.
The G7 passed new sanctions against Russia targeting its energy, metallurgy, technology and defense industries. They also targeted “an international network of organizations that source components for the Russian company that makes Orlan drones.”
Months ago, the Ukrainian secret service pointed out that Russia procures sensitive parts such as microchips for its missile and drone industry from Western companies by sending them via intermediate countries.