“The units of the Wagner Group have taken the control of the entire eastern part of Bakhmut“. That’s how clear it has been Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader and founder of the private company Wagner, in a message released by his press group on Wednesday. If the statement is true and the entire area to the east of the Bakhmutka river is occupied by Russian mercenaries, this would mean that the Kremlin already controls about half of the city.
The day before, Prigozhin claimed that in Bakhmut between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers still remain, which offer stiff resistance to the Russian forces. In addition, last Friday he also assured that his forces had the city “practically surrounded.” However, it would not be the first time that the leader of the mercenaries makes premature declarations on territorial advances not yet materialized.
Prigozhin’s forces have led the assault on the city for weeks, but have repeatedly clashed with the Russian Defense Ministry, complaining that his men have not received the ammunition they need.
[Lo que puede perder Rusia al ganar Bakhmut: en juego sus tropas más efectivas e irremplazables]
More recently, Prigozhin said that the siege had taken on a very high intensity, with fierce fighting “day and night” and some Ukrainian soldiers who are not willing to flee: “They die en masse for Bakhmut and surrender only in extreme cases. They will defend the city to the end, but the Wagner fighters must also do your job to the end“.
In another video posted on his Telegram channel after the message, Prigozhin, standing in front of a tank with explosions in the background, called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “remove the elderly and children” from the battered city. It is estimated that still about 4,500 civilians remain without evacuatingout of a total population of 70,000 people who lived in Bakhmut before the conflict.
Zelensky fears the worst
In case the Russian troops finally manage to take Bakhmut, Zelensky has warned that they will have the “open road” to capture other key cities in the east of the country, as reported in an interview for .
Zelensky justified his decision to keep the Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut: “It is a tactical issue for us,” he said before insisting that his top military commanders unanimously support prolonging their defense of the city after weeks of continuous Russian attacks.
“We understand that, after Bakhmut, the Russians could go further. They could go to Kramatorsk, they could go to Sloviansk, it would be an open road for the Russians after Bakhmut to reach other cities in Ukraine, in the direction of the Donetsk region“, Zelensky explained to the American chain in an interview from kyiv. “That’s why our men are there,” he added.
Zelensky said his motivations for keeping the city are “very different” from Russia’s goals. “We understand what Russia wants to achieve there. Russia needs at least some victorya small victory, even ruining everything in Bakhut, just killing all the civilians there,” he denounced.
It would be the Moscow’s first great victory in more than six months of war and its first significant territorial conquest. For this reason, Zelensky believes that if the Kremlin manages to put its flag in the city, that would help “mobilize their society to create this idea that they are such a powerful army.”
The Ukrainian outlet The kyiv Independent also collected testimonies from more than a dozen Ukrainian soldiers who describe the battle for Bakhmut as “a butchery“. The Ukrainian military told the outlet that poorly trained and unprepared battalions were thrown into the front line “to survive as they could” with a little support from armored vehicles, mortars, artillery, drones and tactical information.
But Russia is also taking its toll on the long siege of Bakhmut. Some analysts point out that Russian soldiers are also suffering enormous attrition to control an enclave that has more symbolic value to the Russians than strategic.
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Limited strategic importance
The Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu declared on Tuesday that the seizure of Bakhmut would seriously weaken the Ukrainian defenses and allow Russia to mount new offensives in the Donbasthe Ukrainian eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia claims to be striving to “liberate”.
However, the United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin downplayed the city’s strategic importance on Monday, saying its capture would represent only a symbolic victory and would not change the course of the war.
