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Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group claimed late Sunday to have seized the Bakhmut mayor’s office in eastern Ukraine, saying the capture means they now control the city “in the legal sense.” For its part, the Ukrainian army said it still holds the city. In parallel, on Sunday morning, the Russian blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, a faithful defender of the war, died in an explosion. This would be the second strategic blow to Russian propaganda communications from the war in Ukraine, also on Russian soil.
“In the legal sense, Bakhmut has been captured. The enemy is concentrated in the western areas,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group, said on his Telegram channel on Monday.
A video accompanying his message showed Prigozhin holding a Russian flag with an inscription in honor of Vladlen Tatarsky, a Russian military blogger who was a staunch supporter of the Ukrainian offensive and was killed in a bomb blast in St. Petersburg on Sunday.
“The commanders of the units that took the town hall and the entire center will raise this flag,” he said. “This is the Wagner private military company, these are the ones who took Bakhmut. From a legal point of view, it is ours,” he said.
Wagner Leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is claiming in a statement from the recently captured Administrative Building in Central Bakhmut tonight that Ukrainian Forces have Withdrawn towards the Western Outskirts of the City with Small “Localized” Fighting still ongoing in some Districts. pic.twitter.com/EygcCeXY8T
—OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) April 3, 2023
However, the Ukrainian army came out to deny the information and said that it still “holds” this city in the strategic Donbass region.
Bakhmut, a pre-war city of about 70,000, has been the scene of especially heavy fighting for months, making it the longest battle in more than a year of Russian military offensive.
Vladlen Tatarsky, assassinated in Saint Petersburg
It appears to be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure closely associated with pro-Russian broadcasting and campaigning for the war in Ukraine.
Vladlen Tatarsky was killed on Sunday April 2 by a bomb explosion in a cafeteria in Saint Petersburg, place which would have belonged to the restoration businessman and head of the Wagner Group, according to the local newspaper ‘Fontanka’.
Russia’s State Investigative Committee said at least 30 other people were injured in the blast, according to Russian media reported by ”. In addition, the authorities have opened a criminal case for “murder in a generally dangerous manner”.
Who was?
Tatarsky’s real name was Maxim Fomin. He was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and fought in 2014 in the self-proclaimed people’s republic. youHe had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and as an influential military blogger he had defended Russia’s war effort in Ukraine while often criticizing the failures of the army leadership.
“We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone that is necessary. Everything will be the way we like it,” appears in a video clip last September during a ceremony in the Kremlin in which President Vladimir Putin claimed four occupied regions. of Ukraine as Russian territory.
clues
According to ‘Fontanka’, the cafeteria usually hosts events on weekends by Cyber Front Z, which is believed to be associated with Prigozhin and which, according to the Institute for Strategic Study (ISD), is a troll factory. which is being used to promote Russian propaganda on social media.
The Tass news agency quoted an anonymous source as saying the improvised explosive device was hidden in a miniature statue, which was handed to Tatarsky as he addressed a group of people in the cafeteria.
The version is related to the video published by Mash, a Telegram channel linked to the Russian security forces. It shows Tatarsky, microphone in hand, receiving a statuette of a person wearing a helmet. The explosion occurred minutes later.
“The force of the explosive device was more than 200 grams of TNT (trinitrotoluene),” security forces told the official TASS news agency.
What is known about those responsible?
For now it is unknown who is behind the explosion. The Russian Federal Security Service accused the Ukrainian secret services of carrying out that attack, which President Putin described as “evil”. Ukraine denied its involvement.
Russian war bloggers reacted in shock to the news of Tatarsky’s death. They are an assortment of independent military correspondents and commentators, with military experience, who have enjoyed wide latitude from the Kremlin to publish hard-hitting views on the 14-month-old war. Putin even named one of them a member of his human rights council last year.
“He was in the hot spots of the special military operation and he always came out alive. But the war found him in a Petersburg cafe,” said Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name ‘War Gonzo’.
This case recalls the bomb directed at another person closely related to the propaganda and dissemination of the war in Ukraine, who was assassinated on August 20, 2022 on Russian soil. It was Dária Dúgina, daughter of a prominent ultranationalist ally of Putin. The Russian journalist died when a bomb exploded, which was under her vehicle, when she was driving on a road on the outskirts of Moscow.
With Reuters and Efe
