2023-05-20 14:30:00
Dementi from Kyiv
Prigozhin announces complete taking of Bachmut
05/20/2023, 4:30 p.m
The Wagner boss announces that his mercenaries will be withdrawn from Bachmut – because the city has been completely conquered. He wants to hand them over to the Russian military. However, the Ukrainian side emphasizes that the fighting is continuing.
The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has announced the complete capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. “Today, May 20, around noon, Bakhmut was completely captured,” Prigozhin said in a video published on the Telegram online service. Armed men can be seen at his side, standing with him in front of destroyed buildings.
Ukraine, meanwhile, immediately contradicted Prigozhin’s statements. Ukrainian soldiers continued to fight in Bakhmut, the senior staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces responsible for eastern Ukraine said. The Russian Ministry of Defense also reported again on Saturday about fighting in Bakhmut.
Different reports from both sides on the status of the battle in Bakhmut are not uncommon. Also from the classic Russian military and from Prigozhin’s mercenary troupe, which compete with each other, there are sometimes different reports.
“The operation to take Bakhmut lasted 224 days,” Prigozhin explained. Only Wagner was there, explained the Wagner boss. “We fought not only with the Ukrainian army, but also with the Russian bureaucracy, which put obstacles in our way,” said Prigozhin. He announced that the city would be handed over to the Russian military. The Wagner forces withdrew from May 25 from the city, over which they had taken full control.
The city had been fiercely contested for months. At the beginning of April, Prigozhin declared that he had conquered Bakhmut “in the legal sense”. “The enemy is concentrating on the western areas,” he told Telegram at the time, pointing out that the city’s administrative building was under Russian control.
In this week and the previous week, however, the Ukraine in Bachmut and especially around Bachmut had also reported successes. Ukraine does not want to give up the eastern city, which has been contested since late summer, in order to prevent Russian troops from breaking through further inland. The city is the main part of the line of defense between the cities of Siversk and Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, established after the Russian conquest of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk. Should the city fall, the route to the major cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk would open up for Russian troops. This would bring a full conquest of the Donetsk region planned by Russia closer.
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