MOSCOW: Russia’s defense ministry said early Sunday that forces of Wagner’s private army, backed by Russian troops, had captured the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut. The ministry’s statement on the Telegram channel came eight hours after a similar claim by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner. Ukrainian officials at the time said that the fight for Bakhmut was ongoing.
The eight-month battle for the city in eastern Ukraine is the longest and perhaps the bloodiest of the conflict in Ukraine. In a video posted on Telegram, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said the city came under full Russian control around noon on Saturday. He spoke among about half a dozen combatants, with ruined buildings in the background and explosions heard in the distance.
However, after the video surfaced, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said that heavy fighting was continuing. “The situation is serious,” she said. “Until now, our defenders control some industrial and infrastructure facilities in the region.” Fighting has been going on for more than eight months in and around Bakhmut.
If Russian forces take control of Bakhmut, they will still face the mammoth task of seizing the remainder of the Donetsk region still controlled by Ukraine, including several heavily fortified areas. It is unclear which side paid a higher price in the Battle of Bakhmut. Both Russia and Ukraine are believed to have suffered casualties in the thousands, although neither has disclosed the number of casualties.
Zelensky underlined the importance of defending Bakhmut in an interview with The Associated Press in March, saying that its fall could allow Russia to garner international support for a deal that Kiev would find unacceptable. Compromise may be required. Analysts have said that the fall of Bakhmut would be a blow to Ukraine and give Russia some strategic advantage but would not prove decisive for the outcome of the war.
Russian forces face the uphill task of seizing the rest of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, including several heavily fortified areas. The Donbass, the province of Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk, is Ukraine’s industrial heartland where a separatist insurgency began in 2014 and which Moscow illegally annexed in September.
About 55 kilometers (34 mi) north of the Russian-held regional capital of Donetsk, Bakhmut had a pre-war population of 80,000 and was an important industrial centre, surrounded by salt and gypsum mines. The city, which was named Artyomovsk after a Bolshevik revolutionary when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, was also known for sparkling wine production in underground caves. Its wide tree-lined avenues, lush parks and stately towns at the end of the 19th century – all now reduced to a smoldering wasteland? Made it a popular tourist destination.
When a separatist insurgency engulfed eastern Ukraine in the weeks following Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, insurgents quickly gained control of the city, but lost it a few months later. After Russia turned its attention to the Donbass following a failed attempt to seize Kiev at the start of the February 2022 offensive, Moscow’s troops tried to take Bakhmut in August but were repulsed.
Fighting there ended in the autumn as Russia faced Ukrainian counter-offensives in the east and south, but it resumed at full speed late last year. In January, Russia captured the salt-mining town of Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, and closed in on the city’s suburbs. Intense Russian shelling targeted the town and nearby villages as Ukraine launched a three-pronged attack to try to crush the resistance at what it calls “Fort Bakhmut”.
Wagner’s mercenaries lead the Russian offensive. Prigozhin tried to use the battle for the city to expand his influence amid tensions with top Russian military leaders, whom he strongly criticized. “We fought not only with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Bakhmut. We also fought the Russian bureaucracy, which put sand in the wheels,” Prigozhin said in the video on Saturday.
In the midst of brutal house-to-house fighting, continuous Russian artillery bombardment left few buildings intact. According to Ukrainian officials Wagner fighters “marched over the dead bodies of their own soldiers”. Both sides expended ammunition at a rate unseen in any armed conflict for decades, firing thousands of rounds a day. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has said that seizing the city would allow Russia to step up its offensive in the Donetsk region, one of four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September.