RE: Bahkmut is under Russian control.21 May 2023 09:04
For Raza, just to show how widely the pincer movement is being reported and not some weak answer back,
https://shafaq.com/en/World/Putin-congratulates-Russia-troops-Wagner-for-capturing-Bakhmut
"Wagner’s boss Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier claimed the city had fallen to his mercenaries in a video posted on Telegram, in which fighters held Russian flags against a backdrop of ruins.
“Today on May 20, around midday, Bakhmut was taken in its entirety,” Prigozhin said in the video, adding that Wagner fighters would search the captured city before handing it over to the Russian army.
“By May 25 we will completely examine [Bakhmut], create the necessary lines of defence and hand it to the military,” Prigozhin said. “We ourselves will go into field camps.”
Artillery sound could be heard in the background of Prigozhin’s video.
‘Bakhmut will be liberated’
The claims came after a week in which Ukrainian forces have made their most rapid gains for six months on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks.
Kyiv had denied Prigozhin’s claim earlier on Saturday but did not have an immediate response to the defence ministry’s statement.
“Heavy fighting in Bakhmut. The situation is critical,” deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar posted on Telegram.
She said Ukrainian troops were “holding the defence” in the city’s “Airplane area”.
“As of now, our defenders control certain industrial and infrastructure facilities in the area,” she said.
Whether the Ukrainian forces have left Bakhmut or not, they have been slowly pulling back inside it, to clusters of buildings on the city’s western edge. Meanwhile, to the north and south, they have seized swathes of territory from Russian troops.
Russia has acknowledged losing some ground around Bakhmut in the past week, while denying assertions by Prigozhin that the flanks around the city guarded by regular troops have collapsed.
Kyiv says its aim in Bakhmut has been to draw Russian forces from elsewhere on the front into the city, to inflict high casualties there and weaken Moscow’s defensive line elsewhere ahead of a planned major counteroffensive.
Moscow has long claimed that capturing Bakhmut would be a stepping stone towards advancing deeper into the Donbas region it claims to have annexed from Ukraine. It has made it the principal target of a massive offensive that failed to capture any significant ground elsewhere.
Prigozhin has acknowledged that Bakhmut has little strategic significance, despite its huge symbolic importance because of the scale of losses in Europe’s bloodiest ground battle since World War II.
The battle for Bakhmut has meanwhile revealed a deepening split between Wagner, a mercenary force that has recruited thousands of convicts from Russian prisons, and the regular Russian military.
For two weeks, Prigozhin has been issuing daily video and audio messages denouncing Russia’s military leadership, often in explet
Sign In
Follow the stocks
