C T Online Desk: Russia said Saturday it has captured the east Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, epicentre of the fighting, as President Vladimir Putin congratulated his troops and private mercenary group Wagner.
The announcement from the Russian army came hours after Kyiv said the battle was continuing, while admitting the situation was “critical”, and with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky meeting G7 leaders in Japan.
Bakhmut, a salt-mining town that once had a population of 70,000 people, has been the scene of the longest and bloodiest battle in Moscow’s more than year-long Ukraine offensive.
The fall of Bakhmut, where both Moscow and Kyiv are believed to have suffered huge losses, would allow Moscow to bring home a key victory after a series of humiliating defeats.
It would also come before a major counteroffensive that Kyiv has been preparing for months. Zelensky himself has warned that the fall of the city would open the way for Russian troops to capture more parts of Donbas.
“As a result of offensive actions of the Wagner assault units, with the support of artillery and aviation of the ‘Southern’ unit, the liberation of the city of Artemovsk was completed,” Russia’s defence ministry said, using the Soviet-era name of Bakhmut.
“Vladimir Putin congratulated the assault units of Wagner as well as all servicemen of units of the Russian armed forces who provided them with the necessary support and flank cover, on the completion of the operation to liberate” the city, the TASS news agency quoted a Kremlin statement as saying.
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’ –
Ukraine, which this month claimed successes in and around Bakhmut, said earlier that the battle was not over.
