Mercenaries from Russia’s private military contractor the Wagner Group claimed victory in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on Saturday after a grueling eight-month battle. For the most part, the pro-Moscow camp is elated that it has finally driven out the stubborn Ukrainian defenders.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied on Sunday that Bakhmut has fallen, Russian businessman and Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed otherwise in a voice memo to his 420,000 Telegram followers.
“There is not a single Ukrainian soldier in Bakhmut village, because we have stopped taking prisoners,” he said.
“There are a large number of corpses from the Ukrainian army. Bakhmut is taken completely along all its legal boundaries, down to the last centimeter. Vladimir Alexandrovich [Zelenskyy] is disingenuous, or he, like our military leaders, is simply unaware of what is happening on the ground.”
In a statement released to the Kremlin’s official press service, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the Russian army and the Wagner mercenary group on the capture of Artemovsk, as the city was known during the Soviet era and until 2016.
Images on both Russian TV and Telegram showed the Russian flag flying from the roof of an apartment building that still stands among the ruins of Bakhmut.
“Without exaggeration, a historic moment – the Wagner fighters raise the Russian flag and the flag of their company on the last street of Artemovsk,” reported Amir Yusupov, a correspondent embedded in the front line, for the state-owned Channel One.
“The city has been evacuated… Many could have left at the end of their contracts, but everyone stayed.”
A masked mercenary interviewed on camera compared the experience to World War II.
“How could I leave the boys?” he asked. “I had to see this moment. These are probably the same emotions that our grandfathers in Berlin felt.”
The Wagner Orchestra, a Telegram channel that describes itself as “fans” of the mercenaries, published a video of bearded commander Alexander “Ratibor” Kuznetsov hoisting Russian and Wagner flags over the devastated city and shouting ethnic slurs at Ukrainians, instructing them to “go fuck yourself!”
Another video on the channel shows a group of Wagner fighters triumphantly firing their guns into the air as a Wagner flag waves in the background.
An article by the state news agency RIA Novosti on the “liberation of Artemovsk” blames the Ukrainian armed forces for any civilian casualties.
“Before the conflict, more than 70,000 people lived here,” it said.
“Most have left the city. According to the refugees, Ukrainian soldiers deliberately shot at civilians.”
The article assured that, despite Ukrainian propaganda, “Bakhmut Fortress” had indeed fallen, allowing Russian troops to push through to the nearby town of Chasiv Yar.
“This is a victory, one that brings the main victory closer,” Andrey Medvedev, a former journalist and politician from Moscow, wrote on Telegram.
“The road ahead is long and difficult, and we still have a lot to do. There will be failures and disappointments. There will be days of dark despair and disbelief. But on such days we can only remember Bakhmut … Glory to the Russian soldier!
No tactical victory
Despite Moscow’s claims of victory, Igor Girkin, nom de guerre Strelkov, a former Russian soldier and intelligence officer who led the original 2014-2015 uprising of eastern Ukrainian separatists, painted a bleaker picture for his nearly 800,000 Telegram subscribers.
He describes Bakhmut’s capture as not a victory in a tactical sense, but as part of the Kremlin’s policy of “freezing the conflict through a compromise agreement”, and as such intending only to exhaust the enemy until Kiev and its Western allies agree. to let Russia keep Crimea and Donbas. Strelkov is a hard-nosed Russian nationalist who thinks Moscow is not taking Ukraine’s conquest seriously enough.
“In general, the operation ended in a strategic failure of our forces,” Strelkov wrote. “The enemy has NOT been driven out of the Donbas in all cardinal directions, in most directions – not moved at all.”
He added that the Russian army had exhausted stocks of weapons, ammunition and manpower that “will be necessary for further offensive operations”.
“That’s why Bakhmut got more attention in the last two months – it was necessary to achieve at least some result ‘for propaganda’ and then ‘take a breath’. And so we won, more or less,” Strelkov said.
Strelkov also warned that the resources spent on Bakhmut, an “unnecessary” and “Pyrrus” victory that was “not worth the effort and money spent on it”, will leave the Russian side vulnerable to the Ukrainian counter-offensive.