FROM OUR REPORTER
KIEV — Few take it seriously now because it has become a simple habit, even a vice: every time Yevgeny Prigozhin gets into trouble, he “bombastically” announces that his Wagner Brigade mercenaries are winning the Battle of Bakhmut.
It’s not true, it never was true, not today and not in the past, but it seems he cares little about being denied by the Ukrainian commanders and by the reality of the war on the ground.
Also because in recent months he has never had too much trouble making different, if not contradictory, statements accusing the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and the Russian General Staff of conducting the conflict “absolutely incompetently” or supplying ammunition to his “fighter heroes”, so much so that if they were to be defeated by accident, the responsibility would lie entirely with them, certainly not his soldiers.
But today the commander-in-chief of the Wagners has one more reason to announce, as he did the other night, that his units raised the flag on the half-ruined roof of the town hall in the center of Bakhmut, and with it the city was “conquered from a legal point of view”. . Except that the Ukrainian soldiers “continue to resist in the western quarters,” to add later. In fact, his words came hours after the assassination of his old friend Maksim Fomin, the nationalist extremist blogger who was killed two days ago while giving a conference in St. Petersburg. “I don’t think the Ukrainians are to blame,” he was careful to contradict those among the men of the Putin regime who wanted to add water to the flames of internal controversy, instead pointing the finger at Kiev. For Prigozhin, the assassination of his friend is a warning: at this difficult moment, when the Ukrainians are defending themselves well and even seem about to launch their spring counter-offensive, also thanks to the huge amounts of weapons and ammunition that are also from delivered to the Western Allies He is taking a big risk. Moscow no longer tolerates criticism, even that coming “from the right” and from supernationalists like himself, who are working to erase independent Ukraine from the face of the earth.
Meanwhile, the bloody tug-of-war for control of this city, which had a pre-war population of 70,000 (less than 3,000 today) and has now become a symbol of the Donbass challenge, continues. It seems that the Wagner vanguards crossed the river that divides them in two and took the shipyards of the Azom Steelworks. But the Ukrainian units have been receiving new reinforcements to guarantee supplies for about a month, and the General Staff from Kiev reiterates that they have no intention of withdrawing them, at least for the time being. “The statement that Bakhmut fell does not correspond even remotely to reality,” said Andryi Yermak, one of President Zelenskyy’s advisers, who returned in his evening speech to Unified Networks Nation to “thank our heroes who are resisting Bakhmut ». , limiting himself to stressing that the challenge “remains difficult”. One of the Ukrainian military spokesmen in Donbass pokes fun at Prigozhin, repeating that the video of the flag was allegedly taken from “somewhere in a toilet”. Even the White House has denied that Wagner controls the city. But the Russians continue to bomb the region. In the past few hours, at least six people have been killed in the Kostyantynivka area, from where Ukrainian units are heading for the front.