HIROSHIMA, Japan
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy said Sunday that Russian forces weren’t occupying Bakhmut, casting
doubt on Moscow’s insistence that the eastern Ukrainian city had fallen.Indonesian President Joko Widodo, second right, talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, third left, during their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan
Responding to a reporter’s
question about the status of the city at the Group of Seven summit in Japan,
Zelenskyy said: “Bakhmut is not occupied by the Russian Federation as of
today.”
“We are not throwing people
(away) to die,” Zelenskyy said in Ukrainian through an interpreter. “People are
the treasure. I clearly understand what is happening in Bakhmut. I cannot share
with you the technical details of what is happening with our warriors.”
“The fight for the city of
Bakhmut is continuing,” the Ukrainian military’s general staff said in a
statement on Sunday evening.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, a spokesman
for the military’s eastern command, said Ukrainian forces control the outskirts
of the city, and “defense forces continue offensive actions on the flanks near
Bakhmut.”
The fog of war made it
impossible to confirm the situation on the ground in the invasion’s longest
battle, and a series of comments from Ukrainian and Russian officials added
confusion to the matter.
Zelenskyy’s response in
English to a question earlier at the summit about the status of Bakhmut
suggested that he believed the city had fallen to Russian forces, and he
offered solemn words about its fate.
When asked if the city was in
Ukraine’s hands, Zelenskyy said: “I think no, but you have to — to understand
that there is nothing, They’ve destroyed everything. There are no buildings.
It’s a pity. It’s tragedy.”
“But, for today, Bakhmut is
only in our hearts. There is nothing on this place, so — just ground and — and
a lot of dead Russians,” he said.Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company shakes hands with his soldiers, in Bakhmut, Ukraine.
Zelenskyy’s press secretary
later walked back those previous comments.
Ukrainian defense and military
officials said that fierce fighting was ongoing. Deputy Defense Minister Hanna
Malyar even went so far as to say that Ukrainian troops “took the city in a
semi-encirclement.”
“The enemy failed to surround
Bakhmut, and they lost part of the dominant heights around the city,” Malyar
said. “That is, the advance of our troops in the suburbs along the flanks,
which is still ongoing, greatly complicates the enemy’s presence in Bakhmut.”
And the spokesman for
Ukraine’s Eastern Group of Forces, Serhii Cherevaty, said that the Ukrainian
military is managing to hold positions in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
“The president correctly said
that the city has, in fact, been razed to the ground. The enemy is being
destroyed every day by massive artillery and aviation strikes, and our units
report that the situation is extremely difficult. Our military keep
fortifications and several premises in the southwestern part of the city. Heavy
fighting is underway,” he said.
It was only the latest
flip-flopping of the situation in Bakhmut after eight months of intense
fighting.
Only hours earlier, Russian
state new agencies reported that President Vladimir Putin congratulated “Wagner
assault detachments, as well as all servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces
units, who provided them with the necessary support and flank protection, on
the completion of the operation to liberate Artyomovsk,” which is Bakhmut’s
Soviet-era name.
Russia’s Defense Ministry also
said that Wagner and military units “completed the liberation” of Bakhmut.
At the G-7 in Japan, Zelenskyy
stood side by side with U.S. President Joe Biden during a news conference.
Biden announced $375 million more in aid for Ukraine, which included more
ammunition, artillery and vehicles.
“I thanked him for the
significant financial assistance to (Ukraine) from (the U.S.),” Zelenskyy
tweeted later.
The new pledge came after the
U.S. agreed to allow training on American-made F-16 fighter jets, laying the
groundwork for their eventual transfer to Ukraine. Biden said Sunday that
Zelenskyy had given the U.S. a “flat assurance” that Ukraine wouldn’t use the
F-16s jets to attack Russian territory.
Many analysts say that even if
Russia was victorious in Bakhmut, it was unlikely to turn the tide in the war.
The Russian capture of the
last remaining ground in Bakhmut is “not tactically or operationally
significant,” a Washington-based think tank said late Saturday. The Institute
for the Study of War said that taking control of these areas “does not grant
Russian forces operationally significant terrain to continue conducting
offensive operations,” nor to “to defend against possible Ukrainian
counterattacks.”
In a video posted on Telegram,
Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin said the city came under complete Russian control
at about midday Saturday. He spoke surrounded by about a half-dozen fighters,
with ruined buildings in the background and explosions heard in the distance.
Russian forces still seek to
seize the remaining part of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control,
including several heavily fortified areas.
It isn’t clear which side has
paid a higher price in the battle for Bakhmut. Both Russia and Ukraine have
endured losses believed to be in the thousands, though neither has disclosed
casualty numbers.
Zelenskyy underlined the
importance of defending Bakhmut in an
interview with The Associated Press in March, saying its fall could allow
Russia to rally international support for a deal that might require Kyiv to
make unacceptable compromises.
Analysts have said Bakhmut’s
fall would be a blow to Ukraine and give tactical advantages to Russia but
wouldn’t prove decisive to the outcome of the war.
Bakhmut, located about 55
kilometers (34 miles) north of the Russian-held regional capital of Donetsk,
had a prewar population of 80,000 and was an important industrial center,
surrounded by salt and gypsum mines.
The city, which was named
Artyomovsk after a Bolshevik revolutionary when Ukraine was part of the Soviet
Union, also was known for its sparkling wine production in underground caves.
Its broad tree-lined avenues, lush parks and stately downtown with imposing
late 19th-century mansions — all now reduced to a smoldering wasteland — made
it a popular tourist destination.
When a separatist rebellion
engulfed eastern Ukraine in 2014 weeks after Moscow’s illegal annexation of
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the rebels quickly won control of the city, only
to lose it a few months later.
After Russia switched its
focus to the Donbas following a botched attempt to seize Kyiv early in the
February 2022 invasion, Moscow’s troops tried to take Bakhmut in August but
were pushed back.
The fighting there abated in
autumn as Russia was confronted with Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east
and the south, but it resumed at full pace 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 city and nearby villages as Moscow waged a three-sided assault to
try to finish off the resistance in what Ukrainians called “fortress Bakhmut.”
Mercenaries from Wagner
spearheaded the Russian offensive. Prigozhin tried to use the battle for the
city to expand his clout amid the tensions with the top Russian military
leaders whom he harshly criticized.
“We fought not only with the
Ukrainian armed forces in Bakhmut. We fought the Russian bureaucracy, which
threw sand in the wheels,” Prigozhin said in the video on Saturday.
The relentless Russian
artillery bombardment left few buildings intact amid ferocious house-to-house
battles. Wagner fighters “marched on the bodies of their own soldiers”
according to Ukrainian officials. Both sides have spent 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 press its
offensive farther into the Donetsk region, one of the four Ukrainian provinces
that Moscow illegally annexed in September.
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