MERCENARIES: PART OF BAKHMUT CAPTURED
The founder of the Russian private military company Wagner claimed Wednesday that his forces had taken the eastern part of Bakhmut and said that seizing the rest of the city would allow the Russian army to accelerate its offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Wagner’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, argued that if Russia’s forces were to take the entire city, where they have been challenged by street-bystreet fighting, they would have more favorable, open terrain to advance.
“The world has not yet met a well-prepared Russian army, their units possessing all of the possible modern equipment that have not yet joined the battle,” Prigozhin said Wednesday in a video message, speaking next to what a New York Times analysis identified as a World War II memorial in eastern Bakhmut.
Explosions thundered in the distance.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on Prigozhin’s claim. Before an informal meeting of European defense ministers in Stockholm slated today to focus on supplying Ukraine with more ammunition, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “We cannot rule out that Bakhmut may eventually fall in the coming days.” But he said that losing Bakhmut would not be a decisive turn in the war, an assessment that reflected the judgment of Western analysts, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Russia, which has poured equipment and fighters into the area, has been attacking Bakhmut from three directions in a persistent attempt to encircle Ukrainian troops and cut off their supply routes. Moscow, which has faced a series of setbacks on the battlefield, sees taking the city as a key step in its effort to capture the entire eastern Donbas region.
Many Western military analysts have questioned
Russia’s ability to significantly accelerate its offensive if the city is captured, saying its forces have been exhausted by the heavy losses suffered in the early stages of the war.
On Wednesday, the U.S. director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told a Senate hearing that Russia lacked the ammunition and troops to make major territorial gains this year and could shift to a hold-and-defend strategy.